


Absolutes

by yellowcottondresses



Category: Nashville (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-02-15 19:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2240913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowcottondresses/pseuds/yellowcottondresses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Juliette always believed she was doomed to fail him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Concepts & Theories

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I was done with weird, improbable, complicated AU futurefics when I wrote “Solstice”, but apparently I was nowhere close. 
> 
> On that note - consider this a companion piece to “Solstice”. Meaning that if you haven’t read that…you’ll probably want to, at least as a springboard for what’s going on here. 
> 
> Tons and tons of thanks to whentherightonecomesalong and barkleyandbarnes on Tumblr for reading early drafts of this.

I.

The first time I listened to the video was the first time I heard my mother’s voice. I was six.

It was a familiar song – “Angel From Montgomery” – but somehow, hearing her sleek, throaty strum of the melodies made it sound new. 

I hit repeat again. Then again. Eventually, I played it so many times that the notes all dissolved together, like the bluesy lilt of a lullaby. 

My dad was with her that night, but he didn’t sing. You can only see him in the video when the camera pans to him. When it does, he practically swallows the frame – ropey arms and a barrel chest, face all lines and angles, like coolly shutting doors. His fair hair under the signature Stetson, eyes staring at his guitar, and he bowed under the stage lights while my mother stood in the circle and howled to the ceiling. 

It was the night she played the Grand Ole Opry. She was nineteen, married, barely pregnant with me. She knew it and so did my father, but they hadn’t told anybody yet.

All extra details. You would never know any of that from the video. It’s just my mother and the mic, my silent, strumming father off to the side, and her voice reaching all the way to the nosebleeds, the song not so much words or melodies but a feeling. 

I may not have known her, but it’s something I understand. 

I love the way music thrums over you. It envelopes you like a wave. It takes you over completely. Some days I just zone out and wait for the music to take me over, and I want to just get lost inside the rhythm or certain chords like it’s a riptide sucking me under. Or a warm, twanging skin. 

My dad’s like that, too. He and my mom, I think it’s the only real thing they shared. 

I’ve seen the music videos, the shaky camera phone recordings, the concert snippets. Seen the way the music overtakes him, how he becomes somebody else once he pulls out his guitar. No, not somebody else. More like…more himself. Or at least, the more “him” version of him than I’ve ever seen. He becomes the most real version of him that he thinks he’s ever been. 

I couldn’t talk about that with Gunnar. It isn’t the same. He isn’t the same. Gunnar doesn’t go someplace else when he plays; he doesn’t become somebody else. Or someone else he doesn’t know how to be, unless he hears the music. 

 

 

II.

My ears hurt. 

Mom thinks it’s from swimming. Dad says it’s from sinus drainage. They argue about it like it’s going to cure the problem. 

They agreed on something, for once – that I should stop swimming – but like that was ever gonna happen. We have regionals coming up, I need to shave seconds off my time, and I need to practice.

Besides – without me in the water with my eyes shut, slicing through the foam like a blade, the sweat and chlorine and feet and overheated pool room, Coach blasting his whistle, I don’t know what to do with myself. 

I need the relief of knowing I’ll be in the water. Down there, I can’t hear anything except me. It’s like somebody poured me back in my skin. Like my arms and legs and nothing else works unless I’m in the lap lane. 

But they made me stop. 

If Paw Paw Glenn were here, he wouldn’t let them force me to stop. He was there to watch, when neither of them were. Even when he was sick, he’d show up, wrapped in sweaters in the hot pool rooms and cheering me on. 

But he’s not and my ears fucking hurt and I don’t care, but they still made me stop. 

Since they called Coach and said I couldn’t swim, I have to meet Keller after last bell. There’s a rock on the sidewalk that I kick all the way down to the carpool line, closing my eyes and wishing for the foamy chlorine skin. I feel itchy without it and off-balance, like my feet are attached to the wrong legs and my back’s all knotted and hunched. 

I looked at myself in the mirror this morning when I got out of the shower. My ears were still hurting, and they looked weird. Like they were stuck on wrong, and didn’t belong to any part of my body. My legs didn’t, either, and neither did my arms. None of it looked right on me; I don’t like right on me.

I need to be under again. To feel like me. To make sense. 

Keller is digging the toes of his shoes into the curb when I stand beside him, waiting for Scarlett. Since Dad moved out, she’s been picking him up from school. Sometimes it’s Deacon, but today Maddie’s car is waiting in the carpool line when I meet him. 

Keller always runs to her, but today he stares when Maddie honks the horn. 

I jab him in the back of the shoulders. “Come on.”

“Why is she here?”

“She’s picking us up.” 

“Where’s Scarlett?”

I lift up my hand to wave to Maddie, let her know we see her. My arm doesn’t feel attached to my body. It doesn’t feel like it’s my arm.

“I dunno.”

Maddie rolls down the window and calls for us, her words jumbled over the sound of the engines and horns and people rushing past us, backpacks and lunch boxes and shoes hitting the pavement. 

Keller isn’t moving, so I push him forward and get into Maddie’s car. After a minute, he follows. 

“Hey guys,” she says. She’s got music playing. She smiles. Her car smells like vanilla and lemons. “Sorry about this. Scarlett had an appointment and Gunnar said he was stuck in a meeting.”

Keller doesn’t say anything, just throws his backpack into the backseat and climbs in. I get in the front, trying to fold my legs into her chair. They know how to be fins in the water but not walk like legs are supposed to. 

“Did you get done with the TV stuff?” I ask, buckling my seatbelt. 

Maddie shrugs. “We packed it in early. Told them I had more important stuff to do.”

“Was it fun?”

She makes a face.

“Fun isn’t the word I’d use,” Maddie replies, hunting for her sunglasses in the console among crumpled gum wrappers and plastic CD cases.

“Still. Being on TV is kinda cool.” 

“Trust me, kiddo,” she says, rolling her eyes, “it’s overrated.”

Maddie looks at Keller in the rearview.

“You guys wanna stop for food?” she asks. “I’m starved.”

Keller doesn’t answer. Maddie adjusts the mirror, watching him glare out the window, and sighs. Then she adjusts her sunglasses and looks at me.

“Well." Her voice tries to sound bright. "You hungry, Finn?”

We pull out of the carpool line and onto the main road. There’s a Taquerita there, and a Donut World, and a smoothie place. All of which will have too many people from school.

“Can we go to Beyond Bagels?” It’s across town. Less chance we’d run into anybody. 

It’s out of the way, but Maddie doesn’t say anything, just turns and starts heading in the opposite direction.

“What about Beyond Bagels?” she asks Keller, still quiet in the backseat. 

He hunches into himself. 

“Kel?”

“I don’t care,” he mumbles. 

He might be crying, but if he is I will seriously punch him in the face. With the arm that doesn’t feel like my arm.

Maddie sighs again. 

“Okay,” she says, still trying to sound like she’s happy. “Bagels it is.”

There’s a CD in the stereo. I turn it up. Scarlett and Deacon haven’t been listening to the radio, either, whenever we’re in the car, ever since we heard that reporter talking about Mom and Dad. 

Beyond Bagels is almost empty, but still we take a table in the back. The cashier obviously recognizes Maddie, because she does a double-take and smiles extra-wide when she hands her the coffee she ordered, but she doesn’t ask for her autograph or a photo or anything. 

That’s Nashville. You can look, but don’t touch. Unless you’re my mom. Or those reporters. 

Maddie glances at her coffee, turning the cup in her hands, a small smile on her face. 

“That cashier knew you,” I tell her.

She nods. “Look what she wrote on my drink.”

I peer at it. Under her name, MADDIE, the cashier wrote YOU ARE WONDERFUL! and then drew a little heart. 

My mom never got hearts next to her name on coffees, that’s for sure. But I don’t tell Maddie that.

Keller is sitting at the table already, picking the sprinkles off the cookie he ordered. He’s got his headphones on, music blaring so he can tune us out. Dad would have a cow if he knew Keller was being rude to Maddie, but since Dad moved out he doesn’t know what we do. 

“He looks pretty upset,” she tells me, as we watch him from the counter. 

I shrug. “He’s been quiet.”

Maddie puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes.

“What about you?” she asks. 

I don’t want to look at her, so I focus on grabbing napkins. 

“Look,” she tells me. “You know everything they’re saying is bullshit, right? They’re tabloids. That’s what they do. They lie about everything to sell papers.” 

She shakes her head. “I mean, if I listened to every single thing wrote about my parents, I would’ve gone crazy a long time ago. You just have to ignore them, Finn, okay? And Keller, too.”

“Yeah, but the stuff they’re saying –”

“Is all made up so they can sell magazines,” Maddie said firmly. “Okay? You have to stop listening to it. Both of you.”

“But it is weird, right? That they’re in the same house again?” I rip more napkins out. “I thought divorced people moved out.”

Maddie looks so sad, I'm glad I'm not looking.

“Not always,” she says. “My mom and dad lived together for a while after they separated. They traded off time at the house until Daphne and I could get used to it.”

“And how long did that take?”

She doesn’t answer, so I sit down at the table next to Keller. He’s still picking sprinkles off.

“Why’d you get that cookie if you weren’t gonna eat it?”

“I am eating it.”

“No you’re not. You’re taking it apart.”

He glares at me. “Fuck you.”

“Hey,” Maddie warns, as she sits down next to us. “Don’t say that.”

Keller scowls. 

“Whatever,” he says. “Our mom doesn’t care.”

“Shut up,” I tell him. 

“Okay,” Maddie cuts in, slapping her hands down on the table. “Here’s the deal. We finish up here, I drop you –“ she nods to Keller – “at your buddy’s, then drive this one to Gunnar’s. Your dad’ll take you guys home. Clear?”

Dad will take us home. Like it’s something we’re all used to by now. Like today’s not the first time we’ve seen him since he left the house. 

Keller slouches in his seat. He looks so much like Dad that it’s like looking at a younger version of him. When Dad used to hug Keller, it was like he was hugging himself – smaller, skinnier, light-eyed and angry, wanting to be told it was going to be all right. 

He didn’t hug me much, but we’re not the huggy-type family, anyway. 

“Did it work?” I ask her. 

Maddie blinks. “What?”

“Did it work. Your mom and dad living apart. Was it easier?”

Maddie’s face falls, and it looks like she might cry for a minute and I can’t take it anymore. 

“It’s always hard, Finny,” she says. 

 

 

III.

“Can you hand me the mayonnaise?”

Avery sticks his head in the fridge.

“Why do you have two different types?” he asks. 

Gunnar slices a tomato in half, then into quarters. He tries to keep the slices thin – Gracie would only eat the sandwich if the slices were thin, and he doesn’t need to waste good produce. 

“The Duke’s is for cooking,” he says, brushing aside the unused bit of tomatoes. “The other stuff is for the kids’ lunches. So we don’t run out.”

Avery looks up at him, mayonnaise in hand and a smirk twisting his mouth.

“You’re a regular Mr. Southern Cuisine,” he tells him. “You should have your own show.”

Gunnar makes a face. “I just like this mayo, okay? It’s sweet. The generic crap is too dry.”

“It’s mayonnaise!” Avery says. “It can’t be dry. It’s all goopy.”

Gunnar swipes the jar out of his hands. “It tastes like cardboard.”

“Mayonnaise is gross on principle,” he replies.

He takes a seat at the kitchen table, grabbing his guitar from the case.

“I was working a little on the bridge,” he says as Gunnar pulls out the cold cuts Scarlett bought. “I think we should re-work that last verse, too.”

“You want me to make something for the boys?” he asks. He slices the ham-and-cheese down the middle, sliding it into a Ziploc. Gracie’s lunch for tomorrow. “We have enough bread.”

Avery shakes his head. “I’ll fix something when I get back.”

Gunnar tries not to notice that Avery doesn’t say “get back home .” 

They had been trying to keep things out of the tabloids for as long as possible – for their sake and the boys’ – but Avery hadn’t told Gunnar much about it, either. And if he talked to Scarlett, she wasn’t telling Gunnar anything. 

“You sure?” he asks. “Scarlett just went shopping today.”

Gunnar knew how Finn liked his sandwiches cut, how much mustard – NOT mayo – and turkey – NOT ham – he liked put between those two slices of bread. He’d known Keller since the day he was born, but Keller didn’t share a crib with his niece. 

Avery is quiet, and Gunnar wonders if he’s heard him. But when he looks up from the counter, he sees Avery watching him, his face pale. 

“Don’t do that,” he says wearily.

Gunnar looks at him. “Do what?”

Avery sighs. 

“Look,” he says, “can we please just…finish this? I gotta fly out in the morning, and I have to be up at four so Emily can drive me to the airport, and I really, really need to finish this stupid demo because I needed it done two weeks ago, and I won’t have time to do it when I get back because Juliette’s got her thing at the Opry –”

“You’re still going to that?” Gunnar asks. 

Avery stares at him.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I’m still going. Of course I’m going.” 

They stare at the floor for a long moment. 

He did promise Avery that they’d work this song out before he had to leave tomorrow. And he needs the distraction, after that spot on TMZ. Not to mention the paparazzi that will be waiting for him. 

“You know,” Gunnar tells Avery, “we do have a guest room. You could stay here tonight.”

Avery runs a hand through his hair. 

“I can’t do that,” he says quietly. 

“It’s not a problem. Scarlett already suggested it.”

“It’s not that,” Avery replies. “I’ll just stay where I am. Easier to leave tomorrow.”

He goes back to his guitar. 

After a moment, he murmurs, “Stay close to the boys.”

Gunnar slides the sandwich into a Ziploc, brushes the scraps aside. After a moment, he grabs two slices of bread and some of the honey ham, because he helped Avery move into the guest house last weekend and he doesn’t think there’s any food in the place. Not that he blames him – with the headlines in the check-out line lately, it’s been hard to quiet Clay whenever they go into Kroger and the boy starts pointing at Auntie Juliette’s picture on the front page. 

“Hey,” Avery asks, finally, “Did you ever hear back from Will?” 

Gunnar knows he’s only being polite, asking about Will. He’s never been a fan of the way he swoops in and out of Maia’s life; takes the way he's failed his daughter personally. But after that TMZ spot, the only alternative is talking about something nobody wants to discuss. 

Gunnar shakes his head. “I’ve been texting him all day. He didn’t say anything about the ceremony.”

From the table, Avery sighs. “Well, maybe he was going to.”

“He didn’t say anything to Maia, either. She had to hear it from Nate.” He sighs. “Who apparently, never told Will he invited her.”

“Maybe he was going to tell her.” He shakes the barrel of the guitar, rattling a pick that got stuck in its hollow wooden belly. “Maybe he was just waiting for the right time.”

Gunnar shook his head. “The right time for what? To tell me he’s gay? Sorry, he’s about fifteen years too late on that.”

He runs his hands over the countertop. Avery has little to no patience when it comes to Will. The way he made promises he couldn't keep and broke Maia's heart; like he broke her mother’s years ago. 

He’d changed Maia’s diapers, babysat when Layla had to work. Put her down for naps beside Finn in the same narrow crib, in his and Juliette’s old apartment. When they buried Layla, he sang a hymn at the funeral. 

“You know, I was there the first time he got married. I didn’t want to be there, I should have stopped it, but I didn’t. Even though I knew it was wrong.” He shakes his head. “But I stood by him.”

He turns around and looks at Avery, who is staring out the kitchen window. “Why doesn’t he think I would stick by him now?”

Avery sighs. “Man, it’s probably not about you.”

“I know it’s not,” Gunnar says. 

“Well, you’re acting like it is!” Avery throws his hands up. “Look, if he wanted you to be there, he would have said something. So maybe he doesn’t want you there. Maybe he just wants it to be the two of them.”

Or maybe, Gunnar thought, Will couldn't let other people see him marry a man. Even if "other people" included Gunnar, or his own daughter.

Gunnar never thought it was a coincidence – as soon as Nate came into the picture, Will’s visits became less and less. Maia knew about her dad – she’d known as soon as he and Scarlett thought she could understand what it meant – but that didn’t mean he wanted to act like she knew. 

He was reminded of the time Will bailed on her eighth grade graduation. Gunnar took a photo of her in her dress, holding her certificate. He hesitated a moment before captioning it “wish you were here”.

He didn’t hear from Will all day, but Nate texted her that morning with “CONGRATS, KIDDO! You’re graduated! Like a cylinder! Except…not cylindrical!” 

Leave it to Nate to use a word like “cylindrical” in a text message. And with the correct use of punctuation. 

Will sure knew how to pick ‘em.

But Maia still had a father, even if he wasn’t around, and whenever he came and went Maia seemed to light up, and Will, too. And it seemed, in the early days, like she loved him more desperately than Gunnar, because he was always either just arriving or just leaving, and the stolen little pockets of time when he’d show up on their doorstep gave her something Gunnar knew he and Scarlett couldn’t. 

“Can I go to Atlanta next weekend?”

Maia had sprung the question on him at breakfast this morning. 

Gunnar was rinsing Clay’s bowl under the sink, guiding soggy Cocoa Puffs down the disposer. His hand stopped under the faucet, and he looked up at Maia, who was watching him like she was challenging him to something. 

“Where did this come from?” he asked.

Maia didn’t blink. “So it’s a no?” 

“I didn’t say that,” Gunnar said. “I’m just wondering where it’s coming from.”

Maia shrugged. “Nowhere.”

“So what’s the problem?” Gunnar asked. 

“Nothing’s the problem!” she snapped.

Scarlett walked into the room with Clay’s backpack in hand. 

“What’s with the shouting?” she asked. 

Maia stared into her cereal. 

“Dad and Nate are having a thing,” she mumbled, “and I want to go.”

“A thing,” Scarlett repeated, catching Gunnar’s eye. He shrugged back. “What kind of thing?”

Maia poked at her bowl, like she was stabbing something there. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Like a ceremony-thing.”

After a moment, she added, “They’re exchanging vows.”

Scarlett and Gunnar stared at each other, eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t know about that,” he said finally.

“I just heard like, yesterday,” Maia said. “He texted me.”

“Who? Your dad?”

Maia was still staring determinedly into her bowl of soggy cereal. “Yeah.” 

He and Scarlett looked at each other for a long moment. 

“We’ll talk to Will about it,” she said finally. 

Maia finally looked up, glaring at them. 

“Dad said I could go!” she said. “He wants me there. What’s there to talk about?”

Scarlett narrowed her eyes. 

“I said we’d talk about it,” she said, her voice clipped. “And then we’ll give you an answer.”

Maia gripped the table edge. 

“Why can’t you tell me now?” Her voice was raised, picking up higher and higher with every note. 

“Watch your tone,” Gunnar said sharply. 

From the living room, Gracie was yelling, “Dad! Where’s my backpack!” Clay told her to shut up and turned his cartoon up louder, and Gracie yelled at him to turn it down. 

Scarlett rubbed a hand over her face. 

“Look,” she said. “We will talk about this later. All right?”

She didn’t answer before snatching Gracie’s lunch out of the fridge and repeating, “All right.”

Then she turned and walked away before Maia could say anything else, shouting “everybody better have your shoes on or else you’re goin’ to school barefoot!”

Gunnar and Maia exchanged glances. Her face was red, mouth tilted down in a scowl that reminded him of Will. His “fuck you, you can’t make me” face. 

“She didn’t say no,” Gunnar reminded her. 

Maia gripped the tabletop. “She didn’t say yes.”

Then she grabbed her backpack, rushing out the door to the car before he could say anything else.

Gunnar remembered how small she’d been when he first saw her. Scrawny and red and plucked-looking, the smallest, softest, warmest living thing he’d ever held. She was too tiny to be from Will, or even Layla; he couldn’t imagine her being from that big baby belly of hers, planetary and firm. She looked too small to be alive, except he could feel her heart beating right into his hands.

Then her frailness grew into the bold toddler who walked at nine months, marched at ten; she never hobbled or toddled or any of those cutesy words people used to describe babies when they could careen back and forth on sturdy little legs. She moved like a character in a comic book; she never did anything without an exclamation point. WHAM! FLING! WHOOSH! SLAM! 

Gunnar remembered Luke Wheeler, laughing as Maia darted around backstage.

“Hoo.” He grinned. “That baby’s on a mission.”

She stumbled into Gunnar, who picked her up. Then she glared at Luke, twirling her pacifier in her mouth suspiciously, the ends of her blonde curls wrapping around the rubber mouthpiece. Gunnar wanted to pop it out of her mouth and pull the damp, long hairs off of it, but Maia would throw a full-scale meltdown if he tried, so he just tried not to think about it. 

He’d tried not to think of a lot of things, back then. Like the kinds of things Luke had said about Will, back when it all happened. Or how, after Maia was born, Zoey and Will couldn’t be in the same room as each other without things getting too awkward for words. Or how, when old ladies would see him and Scarlett with Maia, walking in the park on a Sunday or going downtown or eating breakfast with Maddie and Deacon, they would always coo over Maia’s blonde curls and big blue eyes, clucking their tongues at her while telling Gunnar what a beautiful family he had. 

And they’d felt like a family, a real one. Back then. Scarlett’s ring on his finger, and the first thing he did when they got custody of Maia was trade in the truck for a four-door, with a baby seat in the back. Plus, with her fair hair and wide eyes, Maia did look a lot like Scarlett, and it was – easier? more convenient? safer? – to let those old biddies believe that they all belonged to each other. 

They already felt like it, even if a judge had yet to rule it on paper. 

Then it was official a few years later, before they had Gracie or Clay. Before their ACM award, before the Grand Ole Opry, before they could afford a place like this in Brentwood. The judge’s ruling made Maia theirs, and they contended with Will showing up in the middle of the night like a phantom, appearing and disappearing in the shadows. 

It had made Scarlett furious. Gunnar, too, but he couldn’t bring himself to ban Will from their house. It wasn’t right, she argued, for them to confuse Maia like this; to leave the door open for Will to break her heart over and over again. Letting him just drop in and out like this was going to only leave open wounds, ones that they wouldn’t be able to gloss over when she was old enough to start asking questions about her father. 

He didn’t want to fight with her about this. Gunnar knew how close she’d been to Layla, towards the end. And she wasn’t the only one. Zoey was there when Maia was born, and at Deacon’s after the funeral she stood on the back porch in her black dress, crying and cursing and wiping her damp, red eyes with fistfuls of tissues. Deacon had paid for the funeral expenses himself. Rayna had pulled some strings with her ex-husband, who had found him and Scarlett a top-notch family court lawyer that they never would have been able to afford without the influence of the major of Nashville. 

For the most part, he’d tried to stay quiet, just focus on Maia. And writing, and Scarlett, and music. But no matter how tired he was at the end of the day, every time he closed his eyes he saw Layla’s face on her wedding day, when Will promised he’d be a good and decent husband. 

 

 

IV.

When Gunnar and Scarlett first bought this house, they only had enough room for me and Gracie. Clay wasn’t born yet and wouldn’t be for a few more years, so it was only the two of us duking it out for who got the bigger room. Which seems stupid now, because they’re basically the same size, and anyway, rooms always look smaller without furniture. But that’s the kind of thing that matters when you’re nine, and six. 

I remember, Finn and I plugged his iPod speakers into the wall and set them on the bare white floor. We turned it up and let the music echo through the room, and laid on the floor and stared at the ceiling. It felt too quiet, even with the volume turned up, because everything was empty. It made me feel weirdly empty, too, like the music was going through me the same way it went through the vacant bedroom.

Finn closed his eyes and tilted his face towards the ceiling. I got this feeling that if I didn’t grab his hand, I’d float away. It made my stomach feel scooped out. 

When Clay was born and they needed another bedroom, they cleared out the room at the end of the hallway, the one that used to be filled with Gunnar’s recording stuff. His guitars, his old piano, extra mics and speakers, his drum set and the mandolin he’d had since he was my age. It was all boxed up and relegated to the office downstairs, the desk and chairs moved around to make room when there wasn’t much to begin with. Every trace of music was swept away to make room for a new crib and changing table, and painting the walls blue. 

I helped paint them. Gracie kept complaining about the smell, so Gunnar and I finished it ourselves. On one corner, I traced my hand and ran my brush over it, the shape still visible in the drying paint. 

“You know,” Gunnar told me back then, “your dad and I painted a whole house together once.”

Then he grimaced. “He painted longhorns on the wall.”

“Classy,” I told him. 

“Yep,” Gunnar said.

I stared at my handprint on the wall. If I could paint my father’s palm over mine, it would completely swallow me whole.

Nate hasn’t texted me back since this morning, when I told him what Scarlett said. Dad didn’t answer me at all – what else is new – but if I can get Nate on my side, then Dad can’t really say no.

I should just go up there myself. Gate-crash the whole thing. What’s my dad going to do then – send me all the way back to Nashville? 

Finn has his ear buds in, his book open to the page of math problems he’s supposed to be doing but isn’t. 

“So Avery’s at home now?” I ask. 

He doesn’t answer, so I pull one of the buds out of his ears and ask again. 

Finn shrugs. “He’s in the guest house.”

“Well, that’s good. I mean, it is, right?”

He shrugs again. “I dunno. I think it’s just because Mom’s going on tour soon and it’s easier for Dad to drive us everywhere instead of always asking Gunnar and Scarlett.”

“How’s Keller dealing?”

“I dunno. He doesn’t ask questions. He stays at his friend’s a lot, so he’s not around.”

Then he closes his book, and flicks through his iPod. We’ve been home almost an hour, and he’s only done one problem. 

Finn will do anything to avoid math. Not me. It’s like a conversation that always has a resolution. Numbers can go back and forth, sometimes be letters and sometimes be imaginary and sometimes be not real numbers at all, but no matter what there’s always an answer to be reached. It’s what always makes sense – there’s always an answer, and it’s always the same, and there’s no room for interpretation. 

There was an answer, and problems could always be solved. That’s why they were there. 

It’s absolute.

“Here.” I hand him my worksheet, the one we did a few weeks ago. It’s the same set of problems Finn has now, except since we’re the honors class we did the problems weeks ago and already received our grades back. It’s one of those stupid things I love about our school – either they really don’t believe we cheat, or just want fewer papers to grade. 

“Just copy those,” I tell him, “but change the numbers.”

Finn rolls his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Fisher doesn’t check them. Once I used the same worksheet for two weeks and she didn’t notice. She’s, like, three million years old.”

That doesn’t mean I want to get busted. 

“Just change the numbers, okay?” I tell him. 

Finn makes a face, but takes the worksheet and starts copying. 

I took Finn’s class last year like the rest of the advanced math students, with Coach Pitts. He’s the coach of the basketball team, but athletes avoid his class because he doesn’t bullshit or give them higher grades just so they can play – he flunks everybody equally and doesn’t take any shit. 

All last year, I thought Pitts hated me. He barked out my last name whenever I had to answer a question, scribbled my grade at the top red corner with red ink that made an A look imposing, like it wasn’t as good as you thought it was. And then at the end of last year, Pitts signed my recommendation for honors pre-calculus. He wrote “solid worker. Motivated” in the same strict handwriting he scribbled my grades in, that made the words not seem like a compliment. 

Now he teaches AP Anatomy & Physiology for junior year, and this one class called Concepts & Theory, which is for seniors in upper level math. I have to pull a 95 average all three years in every math class before I can qualify to take Pitts’ senior class, and so far I have it. I’ll keep it, too, because I’m getting into that class.

Technically I still have all the old homework assignments from his class. I could give them to Finn, let him copy the answers. I keep all my old homework, and the binders, in my closet. I could let him have all those, but sometimes, it’s nice to take them out, look through them. Just to see. 

I’m capable. 

Gunnar doesn’t get it. He tries, but he didn’t go to college; he didn’t even finish high school. Scarlett went to Ole Miss for a while, but didn’t finish. Neither of them really get school, not like I need to. Gunnar keeps trying to tell me that it’s not the end of the world if I get a B, that they know I’m smart and grades don’t really matter, and I know what he means but he doesn’t know.

Sometimes, I get so fed up with him that I just want to turn and tell him: my mom got into Harvard . 

“There aren’t any numbers here,” Finn mutters, fiddling with the pen cap. “It’s just letters.”

“It’s slope,” I tell him. 

“The fuck is slope?” He scowls. “They should just rename math class ‘what the fuck is that’ and no one would know the difference.

I roll my eyes. 

Finn stares at the sheet for a second, then pushes it aside.

“This is all such bullshit!” He groans. “There aren’t even any numbers in this problem, and the answer is still a number! What the fuck!”

I’m about to roll my eyes again, but there are footsteps up the stairs, and then Avery’s standing there, frowning at us. 

“You can stop the cussing,” he tells Finn. 

Finn glares back at his dad, but doesn’t say anything.

“We were doing homework,” I offer. I don’t like it when Avery gets mad. Gunnar I can handle, but Avery makes you feel like he’s going to peel you open with the look in his eyes. 

“Well, do it without the cussing,” Avery replies, but he doesn’t look at me – he’s still staring right at Finn. 

Finn looks away, and Avery walks back down the hall. It’s so quiet, I think I can hear my stomach dropping as his footsteps fade on the stairs. 

“Come on,” I say, when Finn’s being too quiet. “Just do the worksheet.”

“Or what?” he says. He doesn’t look at me, but his hands are so sweaty that the edges of the paper are crinkling, curling into each other. “It’ll get cold if I don’t finish it?”

I look at the door, like Avery might still be standing there, even though I can hear him and Gunnar downstairs talking like they don’t want to be overheard. Finn puts his ear buds back in and crumples up the worksheet, pushing it off my bed. 

“What fucking ever,” he mutters, and lays back on the covers, closing his eyes. 

He’s not going to listen, so I take the worksheet from him and fill it out myself. I change a few numbers around and make the answers look wrong, so Fisher suddenly won’t question Finn’s leap in math ability, but in a few minutes I’ve finished the whole thing and slide it back into his notebook.

Nate’s the only one who gets it. The school thing. He gets why I need to get good grades, why I need Pitts’ Theory class so badly. He went to Columbia and got a masters from Princeton, and he’s the only person in my whole life who knows what it means, that my mom got into Harvard. 

He gets me, almost as much as Finn does. 

 

 

V.

She doesn’t want to go home, so she and Maddie are finishing their song at her place by the lake. 

“Why didn’t Star Towns ever ask you to do a spot?” Maddie asks, kicking off her shoes. One of Finn’s hoodies is draped over the back of the couch, and she stuffs it under her head as a pillow. 

Juliette rolls her eyes. Because Juliette Barnes’ Star Towns would have been three things: her empty rented mansions, her full liquor cabinet, and her full bed. 

“They found other ways to put me on TV,” she answers drily. “Avery did an episode for it, though. A long time ago.”

He did, but he didn’t like to really talk about it. “The Dark Times”, he’d call it, when he’d had a deal and a song on the radio and a sugar mama – which is officially Juliette’s favorite part of that story, for the record.

Maddie sighs. “Did they want him to talk about my parents the whole time?”

“No.” Juliette kicks her heels off into the corner, and then nearly trips over a pile of Keller’s hockey pads. “Shit! Didn’t I tell him to pick that up?”

She throws the pads at the wall, where they thump dully back to the ground. 

Maddie is watching her with a creased forehead, and Juliette makes herself chill out. 

“That was after,” she tells her. “Avery didn’t start working for Highway 65 until after I had Finn. The Star Towns thing was before we met.”

Maddie is still watching her, like she has been for the past few weeks now. It’s the same look Deacon gives her, whenever he takes the boys to school. 

“The producers are driving me insane,” Maddie says after the pauses get too long, and Juliette is grateful. Neither of them really want to talk about the stupid show, but it’s better than talking about anything else. “All they did was ask me stuff about my mom and Deacon. And Harrison. Like everybody in this city doesn’t already know everything there is to know. And all everybody’s interested in is asking ‘are they the next Deacon and Rayna’?”

She rolls her eyes when she asks the question, making air quotes with a scowl. 

“It’s just to sell the show,” Juliette says. She sticks her head in the empty fridge like something edible might appear. “They have to play up to that.”

“And what, I’m not allowed to be my own artist?”

Juliette shuts the refrigerator door and smiles grimly. “Not with parents like yours, Kiddo.”

Maddie blows out a breath. 

“You got any vodka?” she asks, sounding defeated. 

Juliette peers in the cabinet under the sink. “Whiskey.” 

“Fine with me.”

Juliette can’t say she’s surprised about any of this. From the time she met Maddie at age twelve, she knew this was the kind of girl to whom Big Things Happened, even without her pedigree of country music royalty. 

But still. She wasn’t her mother. And she both wanted to be like her and distance herself from her in equal measures, which wasn’t something the world granted her. 

Like now, with the whole Star Towns issue. They’d spent the day before at Deacon’s house, with Scarlett and Clay. They’d shot some B-roll of Scarlett playing the banjo, Deacon on the piano, Maddie on her guitar – the three Claybournes, singing in a round. They’d interviewed both Scarlett and Deacon about growing up with their musical legacy, about what it meant for Maddie to have that kind of pedigree and the opportunities awarded to her. They staged some scenes of Maddie and Deacon writing a song together, of Scarlett and Maddie harmonizing on an old Carter family staple. They showed old footage of Maddie as a teenager, her first time performing at the Grand Ole Opry with Deacon and Rayna at the age of sixteen, and singing at the White House a few years after later at the inauguration ceremony, at the request of the new President and First Lady. There were so many moments, so many highlights that began when she was so young. 

“Then everybody wants to talk about Harrison,” Maddie continues. “And how we’re supposed to be just like my parents. Except that’s stupid, because Harrison’s nothing like Deacon.” 

She rolls her eyes. “That’s why I’m with him! Who says I want to be with some guy who reminds me of my father, anyway! 

Juliette watches Maddie put her hands over her face, pressing her forehead. 

“I’m with Harrison,” she says, her voice scratchy, “because he’s Harrison.”

Juliette stares out the window, and thinks that Harrison – quiet, pale, tongue-tied Harrison, who called her “Ms. Barnes” for a whole year until Juliette finally told him to cut the “Miss” crap and call her Juliette, already – was about as far from Deacon as any girl could get. 

“Can I stay here for the night?” Maddie asks. “I don’t feel like driving.”

“Sure you don’t want Deacon to pick you up?”

Maddie snorts. “No. He’ll just want to talk about it. And I’m so sick of talking about it.” She shakes her head. “I just wanna get drunk, and it’s not like I can do that in front of him.”

She pours the glasses, hands Maddie the less-full one. Then she drapes herself across the futon, which overlooks the calm, clear water. The same water where she and Deacon wrote “Undermine” a million years ago, but she’s never told Maddie that particular story and doesn’t plan on it. 

Who knew that only a few short years after she and Deacon wrote their song, she’d actually fulfill what she’d told him. Build a house by the water, on Tammy Wynette’s land. Have her own place to go, to hide. To write and play and create. 

Back then, it felt like a reward. And it had been, to see that dream realized. Because so many were finally coming true. The album Juliette released the year after Finn was born – her first record with Highway 65 – launched her right where she’d always wanted to be, at the top of the country charts. It earned her a CMA for Album of the Year, a GRAMMY nomination for Album of the Year in any genre. It drew comparisons to Rayna’s first album, in terms of female historical releases. The biggest song off the record, “Has Anybody Ever Told You”, was reviewed and spoken about in the same breath as “Rose-Colored Glasses” and “Stand By Your Man”. 

Suddenly, the people who burned her albums and called her a slut were changing their tunes. It proved that after cheating scandals and renouncing God and having an illegitimate child, she could stand among the greats and feel like it was all right to do so. Like she finally had a right to belong. 

And it’s not like Avery’s life was stalling, either. After Deacon’s “Alive At The Bluebird” EP swept a ton of big-buzz nominations at award ceremonies, Rayna asked him to produce her live album at the Ryman the following year. It was supposed to make up for the fact Highway 65 had no main act other than Rayna, since Scarlett left the label and Juliette was too pregnant to handle a major tour. The album, called _American Live!_ was a live concert special with Deacon singing their old hits, along with Maddie and Daphne and a handful of up-and-coming artists from Highway 65 making guest appearances. 

He got a lot of publicity for the album, which became a huge success. It went platinum, was nominated for two GRAMMYs, and officially put Avery on the map as a producer – enough for Rayna to ask him to work on more albums for Highway 65, to which he agreed. He not only produced Juliette’s first album on the label, but Deacon’s, which was also a four-starred, CMA-nominated, award-winning success. And for a while, it seemed like his phone never stopped ringing. He’d proposed to Juliette not long after the GRAMMY nomination, and everything, it seemed, was clicking into place. 

So they got married. Built this house. Made music. Another dream come to life.

It had made so much sense, at the time. Like things were allowed to go this way. 

She closes her eyes. 

“You hungry?” she asks Maddie. She kicks her legs back over the futon and marches to the kitchen, looking through the empty fridge again. She can’t sit still, not now. 

“Anything but pizza,” Maddie replies.

Juliette refills both their glasses, then fishes around in the drawer where they kept take-out menus for nearly every restaurant in the city that delivered. She digs through the pile for the one to Hunan Hut when she comes across a half-eaten package of Twizzlers. 

Keller’s the only one who likes these things, though why he hid them in this drawer is beyond Juliette. She stares at the package for a moment, then rips off one of the long straws, bites the edges off, and sticks it in her glass. 

“Did you talk to Finn at all?”

Maddie busies herself tuning her guitar that doesn’t need tuning. 

“I did,” she says, after a moment. She looks at Juliette. “He didn’t say much.”

“You know how he’s taking this?”

Maddie shrugs. “He asked how it felt when my parents split.”

“I hope you left out the part where you ran away from home and had me pick you up at a gas station in the middle of the night.”

“I just told him it was hard.” She strums the taut strings. “Like I said, he really didn’t say much.”

She takes a bite of the Twizzler straw, chewing on the too-sweet licorice taste. It always surprises Juliette that she hates licorice, even though she’s known it for years. Yet somehow, she can never remember that before she takes a bite, and the result always ends up the same – surprised and disappointed. Like a memory you can’t stop poking, even if it hurts. 

Finn is always her stoic one. Keller’s like Avery –shit at hiding what he feels, and wants the whole world to know it – but Finn never gives any of himself away. 

“I don’t know how he’s handling anything,” she says, and twirls the end of the candy between her fingers. 

Keller’s hockey pads are in the corner, still slumped on the floor. They smell like sweat and dirty ice, the inside of a locker room. She ought to wash them, but then figures she ought to wait for Emily’s help. If she tries to use the washer, she might end up burning the house down. 

Avery always took care of that stuff, anyway. 

“You want sweet and sour chicken, right?” 

Maddie’s voice sounds very far away. “What?”

“Sweet and sour chicken? That’s what you usually get.”

“Oh, right. Yeah. And a side of brown rice.”

Maddie nods, already dialing the number, when she frowns at her phone.

“What?” Juliette asks. 

Maddie shakes her head. 

“Nothing,” she says. “Just Harrison.”

“Go on,” Juliette says, waving her hand. “Go and answer it. I’ll order the food.”

“No, it’s not a problem.” Maddie presses IGNORE, and keeps dialing the number for the Chinese place. “I’ll talk to him later.”

Juliette rests her hands on her hips.

“Looks like Deacon’s not the only person you’re avoiding,” she says. 

Maddie raises her eyebrows at her, but before she can say anything the restaurant picks up, and she turns away from Juliette to order their dinner. 

Juliette takes another bite of the Twizzlers, wincing at the taste. It coated her tongue, sticking to her teeth. When she was pregnant with Keller, she’d craved anything salty, but with Finn she could barely eat without getting sick. She hardly gained weight, even after nine months.

She used to believe she was doomed to fail him. Her dark-eyed oldest. The first time she saw Finn on the ultrasound, it felt like someone knocked the planet out from under her. She hadn’t even started getting morning sickness, or taken a home pregnancy test. It would mean telling Glenn, Emily. Avery. It would make it too real – the disappointment, the disgust, the guilt. Bitter as the licorice. 

Only a handful of people knew, even now. Avery. Rayna. Deacon. Glenn and Emily. And she supposed Gunnar knew, which meant Scarlett probably did as well, but neither of them had ever said a word about it in fifteen years, so she couldn’t really be sure. 

Maddie didn’t know, and Juliette had no plans to tell her. The girl had enough daddy issues of her own to sort through without needing to deal with Juliette and Finn’s, and she didn’t think Maddie would be too sympathetic to the decisions Juliette had made for her son. 

But not all fathers were Deacon. Not all secrets were meant to be shared. 

Rayna liked to lecture about putting the past behind her, but she had Deacon. She was one to talk.


	2. Dark Energy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently this will be a three-parter? Which wasn’t planned, but then again, none of this story was. I didn’t even plan on finishing it, especially after the new season started and invalidated a huge plot point in this story, but then again this story went off the canon rails a while ago, so I figured, why not just keep going.

I.

 

 

I have to get out of here, because after Dad got done yelling at us I still feel like I’m waiting for him to come back and yell again. So I kick my feet off Maia’s bed and head to the bathroom, but she’s too busy leaning over her homework to notice. She’s moved on to science now – the sun and the moon, planets and galaxies, comets and gravity and black holes. The study of the whole universe, like anybody can actually know that. 

Maia’s bathroom is the best room in the house. It’s blue – blue rugs, blue shower curtain, blue towels and makes you feel calm just by sitting there. It smells like brand new soap and sometimes I just sit there and smell it, the spiciness of clean. 

Like now. I sit on the toilet lid and look at the blue and it’s like being underwater, like swimming. Dad’s footsteps aren’t on the stairs and Maia is still doing homework, I’m math-tarded and don’t give a shit. Who gives a fuckwad about slope, anyway. But Maia loves it. She says it’s like planning, making lists, working your way back to square one. 

She’s weird like that. Always has to do things so perfectly. When we were in seventh grade, we had to make graphs for lab reports and Maia would seriously use half the pad of graph paper trying to make hers perfect – no crooked lines, no eraser smudges, no slanted handwriting. Then she’d get frustrated and start crying, and get mad at me when I told her she was being stupid and it didn’t matter if it was perfect, our teacher was the middle school assistant football coach and didn’t care about grades and just gave everybody eighties because he didn’t want to read the entire lab report. I know that because once I wrote the song lyrics to one of my dad’s songs in the middle of a paper about kinetic energy, and he still gave me an eighty-seven.   
But still, she’d have to do them. Over and over and over again, until she thought they were perfect. Even though she always had the highest grade in class, and one bad grade wouldn’t hurt. 

I get it, though. Even when we were little and grades didn’t matter, it’s always been like this. It’s because of her mom, even if she’s never said it and gets really pissed at me when I tell her.

Her mom was really young when she got pregnant. Younger than our teachers. When I Googled her, it said she was nineteen when she got married, twenty when she had Maia, and twenty-one when she died. 

That’s only six years older than I am now. Even Daphne’s older than that. 

I try to imagine me, six years from now. Being married, having a kid. Being dead. I can’t, but I looked at a lot of photos of Maia’s mom and think she looks like Maia, except with darker hair. She’s pretty. For some reason, she looks like somebody we would know; like someone’s older sister we’ve known our whole lives. She didn’t look like a mom, though; she looked like us, like she was our age. Except she wasn’t, because she’d had sex and was married and going on tour with my mom. 

There’s a lot of stuff on the internet about Maia’s mom – some music videos and interviews, but mostly clips from that TV show she had with Maia’s dad. The show is kind of really famous, even if it only lasted one season before everybody found out her dad was gay. Apparently it was really popular when it was airing, but after everything that happened with her dad, it became even more famous. And then, after the crash that killed her mom, it really blew up. Now everybody’s seen it, or at least knows about it. Including all the fucking morons we go to school with. 

Maia HATES that show. Hates it hates it hates it. She refuses to watch it, even the parts that don’t make her parents look incredibly stupid. She says it’s not them at all. I wonder how she knows that, given that her dad’s not around and her mom died when she was too little to remember, but Maia says she’s never seen anything from that show and never will. 

It really is a stupid show, the kind that’s only funny if you forget that the people you’re laughing are real and have feelings, and aren't nearly as idiotic as the show makes them look. I always feel bad if I laugh at some part of it, because these aren’t the usual reality TV morons who you can tell are too stupid to do anything else with their lives and just want to do anything to get famous. These are my best friend’s parents. And I feel like, whenever I laugh at some dumb thing her mom says or how stupid they make her dad look, or think that the whole idea of her parents having a reality show is the worst idea in the world, I feel like I’m insulting Maia. 

Besides, Maia never laughs or makes fun of me for the shit people say about my mom and dad. She’s always saying how it's all made-up shit, like that reality show, and that if anyone laughs or tries to talk shit about my parents, I should make them sorry they did.

In the season finale, Maia’s mom finds out she’s pregnant with her. She has the stick she had to pee on, and the camera zooms in, and we see two lines appear in blue. I don’t think any of this idiotic crap is actually like real life, but that scene is different. She actually cries when she finds out, but it’s so obvious they’re the good tears. The happiness in her mom’s eyes is so real, it makes my head hurt. 

I can’t imagine what Maia would feel, seeing that. 

The scene after that is one with just her dad, being interviewed. 

“It’s a surprise,” he admits, laughing and scratching the back of his head. All I can think of whenever I see that moment is, holy crap, that’s the same look Maia gets. 

“But of course I’m excited,” he says, and he smiles into the camera. “I never expected things to go this way, but I definitely believe everything turns out the way it’s supposed to. And we’re supposed to be parents now.”

He shakes his head, like he can’t quite believe he’s saying that.

“And I can’t wait,” he says. His voice drops to almost a whisper. “Being a dad is going to totally change my life. And I can’t wait to meet the person that’s gonna do that.”

He laughs. 

“I’m ready. I’m excited. I’m happy.” He grins into the camera, and the look on his face reminds me of Maia again. I can’t decide whether she looks more like her mom or her dad; whenever I see a picture of either one of them, it’s like her face is warring to decide which one she takes after more.

“And I’m completely scared shitless.”

They don’t say the “shitless” part, of course. They bleep it out. But you know it’s there.

The next scene after that is with Maia’s parents lying on the couch together, with their arms wrapped around each other in ways I only see people do in sappy movies. Her mom’s laughing, and her dad pushed back her mom’s t-shirt to show the camera her stomach. It’s so pale and bare you can’t imagine that there’s a baby in there, but Maia’s inside. He kisses her stomach, the place where Maia’s growing, and runs his hand over it. Like he’s really touching her, or already trying. 

I never know what to do about the whole “gay” thing, with her dad. People at school always call each other “faggot” and “gaytard”, and it doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean. A few people still call Maia “Lesbo Lexington”, even though she’s been going by her mom’s name her whole life. Maia swears it doesn’t matter to her, people can think whatever they want, but I know it gets to her. It bothers her more when people say shit about her dad than her, though. Once, when we were in sixth grade, someone wrote “DYKE” on her social studies binder in red Sharpie. She threw it out and didn’t tell the teacher. But she’s been in trouble before for hitting people, guys like Keean Thompson and Jake Bradshaw and Aiden Wells, who have been giving Maia shit our whole lives and said she was probably a lesbo dyke, too, just like her “fucking fairy dad”. 

But Maia doesn’t act like it’s weird. She talks to her dad’s, like, partner, or whatever, all the time. His name’s Nate. They’ve been together a long time. She says he’s really nice.

They met in a dentist’s waiting room. She swears it’s not as weird as it sounds. 

She’s been attached to her phone all day, waiting for him to text her about the thing in Atlanta. She texts with her dad a lot, too, but talks to Nate more. When I asked her why, she says that Nate just gets her a lot better. It’s easier to talk to him.

Personally, I think someone that gay-marries a girl and then dumps her when she’s pregnant with his kid owes Maia a lot more than some text messages. That’s just me. But I learned a long time ago it’s best to shut the fuck up when it comes to Maia’s dad. 

Besides today, the last time my dad and I were in the same room as each other was the night he moved out. They were screaming at each other, and it was like they forgot Keller and I were in the same house as them and could hear everything they were saying. 

“I can’t be around you right now. Just let me get out of here without starting another round of this.”

“Fine! I don’t have to pretend to care about your feelings!”

The door slammed, and Dad’s car spun out of the driveway. Keller was looking at me like I was supposed to tell him what to do, which freaked me out more than anything else.  
Mom stood in the doorway, her feet bare. She stared at where Dad had just been standing like he was still there. Then she turned and went into the bedroom, not shutting the door behind her.

Keller was still staring at me like he expected me to fix this, and that kept freaking me out. 

“Maybe you should go to bed,” I told him, after staring at Mom’s closed bedroom door.

“I’m hungry,” Keller said. 

“Then go get something to eat.”

“I don’t want anything here.”

Then he started crying, and it made me so pissed off to see that, because why was he crying?

“What do you want me to do?” I snapped. “Make something?”

He kept crying, so I yelled at him to shut up. Then he ran into the bonus room and cried on the couch, like a baby. 

Mom’s door was still shut and Keller was still acting stupid, so I went to the kitchen to see if some food really would shut him up. But there was nothing in the house except cereal, and it wasn’t even the kind anybody liked to eat. 

Dad did all the grocery shopping. And it looked like he hadn’t in a while. 

Keller wasn’t crying when I went back upstairs, so I went into the den and turned on TV. There was nothing on except this movie Maia really likes, and I thought Maia would want to watch it with me over the phone so I thought I’d call her, but then she’d ask why I was calling her so late, and I didn’t want to tell her that it looked like my dad moved out and didn’t say goodbye to us, and Mom was locking the door and Keller was crying, and I didn’t know when I’d see Dad again. 

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table the next morning, with a red and white face. She had a cup of coffee in her hands that she wasn’t drinking, and when Keller and I came into the kitchen in the morning she blinked at us like she couldn’t remember who we were. 

“Mom,” Keller said. “We have to go to school.”

Mom kept blinking at us. 

Deacon had to take us to school that morning. Keller forgot his lunch, and we were already at school when he realized that, so he started crying and I yelled at him to shut up and stop being a baby, and all I could think of was how much I wanted to scream at Dad. Not just because he left, but because I already knew. The Thing I Wasn’t Supposed To Know.

I wanted to scream it right in his face. Like it was his fault. And it scared me because I didn’t know how he would look at me if he found out I knew. 

My ears still hurt. 

I want to pull them but it’ll just hurt worse. It’s quiet in here. I want to be in the water. I feel twitchy and restless if I don’t get in the pool at least once a day. I have to swim every day, because then I’m too tired to feel like I’m twitching and humming and itching with the things that keep replaying over and over again, the shit I wish I didn’t have to know. 

I don’t want to go home. I want Paw Paw Glenn to still be here. I don’t want to listen to the reporters or the people at school or the grocery store headlines.

I want it all to stop, stop, STOP.

 

 

II.

 

 

Around the third or fourth drink, Maddie ditches her guitar for Avery’s piano in the corner, one that was slightly out of tune. But Maddie’s fingers are jumping from key to key without her usual finesse, so it hardly matters that no one had played this piano in a few months. 

Deacon taught himself to play the piano, as did Gunnar. Only Avery had formal lessons as a kid, playing in recitals and everything. 

She used to beg him to play for her. His favorite composer was Chopin – Juliette had pronounced it “Chop-In” in her head, and when she heard that it was actually pronounced “Show-PAN”, she was grateful she never gave Avery the opportunity to correct her on it. She had some of his compositions downloaded on her iPod; it used to be her pre-show warm-up music, to shut everything out. 

He played once at a summer picnic once. They were all goofing around, singing old songs and passing guitars around, and Avery ended up plunked down on Scarlett’s keyboard. He started playing, and all of a sudden everybody stopped – even Clay, who was a few months old back then and sat drooling, mesmerized, in Scarlett’s lap. 

“I had no idea you could play like that,” Deacon said, when it was over. It took a minute after the music stopped for anyone to talk, and hearing his words felt like surfacing after holding your breath under the water. “And I’ve known you for how long?”

Avery shrugged.

“I’ll tell my mother the great Deacon Claybourne just complimented her piano lessons,” he said with a slight smile. “She’ll be thrilled.”

She wondered why he didn’t play anymore. Or maybe he just didn’t play for her. 

Maddie is still plinking out a manic little melody. Her phone is on the coffee table – two missed calls from Harrison – and Juliette figures she’s not the only one avoiding going home. 

She doesn’t see what she has to look forward to, being there. Padding through the home at night, Avery gone and the boys asleep. It’s a relatively new house – they only moved in two years ago – but it’s funny how the walls always feel etched with the same words, the same echoes: 

do you deserve this? Do you deserve this bed? This life? These people you think love you?

The worst confession – sometimes, she thought, maybe. 

Like when the boys were small and noisy, filled with sweat and energy and sticky hands. Sometimes they’d wake her and Avery up at five in the morning; sometimes they’d spill orange juice on her clothes and she’d snap at them; sometimes she’d be stuck cleaning barf out of the carpets and doing laundry when they got sick in the middle of the night. When they were really small, Avery would keep them backstage during her shows, wearing noise-cancelling headphones that looked comically huge on their round baby heads. The walls to their bedrooms were painted with smiling airplanes and dinosaurs, and even the clouds had a little grin to them. They dealt with Finn’s pathological fear of dogs, the way Keller sucked his thumb until he was almost seven. 

She signed away her rights to her own life at fifteen, writing her name on that Edgehill contract. The right to her own privacy, her own secrets, the context to every word that came out of her mouth. The price of fame, everyone told her. The price – sitting in the laps of men who patted her head and told her she was a “pretty little thing”, and never asked, just took. Tabloids following her car. People accosting her in the grocery store. Snapping flashbulbs in her face when she had a baby in her arms – no wonder Finn had been so afraid of dogs, they must have reminded him of the paparazzi chasing them down the street when he was a baby, their voices like barks as they yelled and snapped their photos and tried to get the best shot of Juliette Barnes screwing up her entire life again, while Avery tried to cover their son with a blanket so no one could sell his face, his fear, to the highest bidder. 

And that was after the cheating scandal. The picketing, the riots, the album burnings; the protests of her concerts and the people throwing paint on her. 

An album at the top of the country charts less than two years later helped. A little. Just not as much as the price of fame. 

And then hearing everybody tell her – honey, this is how it is. Get used to it. 

Once she caught a reporter sneaking around backstage, posing as a stage hand. He was trying to talk to Finn, who was four and playing with his train set. Avery called the cops; Deacon literally threw him out the door. Juliette yelled at Finn about talking to strangers; he ran to Avery and cried, hugging his daddy’s waist. She demanded more security, fired the people she had. When Keller was born, a nurse had sold a photo of her newborn son to Us Weekly. She’d been fired when the hospital found out, and they’d taken the magazine to court, barring them from publishing any photos of her children. 

The last contract she’d signed her name on, she’d made sure to read the fine print. All the restraints and clauses, the rules and by-laws, the headnotes and footnotes and every phrase drafted, right down the last semi-colon. She and Avery had signed on the dotted line only after both their lawyers had triple-checked it. 

None of them would ever speak of this to any of the press. Avery’s name would be on the birth certificate, as it had been when it was filed three days ago. There would be no discussions of blood tests, child support, or paternity claims. Then the three of them signed on the dotted lines, and that was the last she and Avery ever saw or heard from Jeff Fordham. 

He signed the contract with a fountain pen that Juliette figured cost more than her double-wide growing up. Hesitated the briefest second – just a second.

He stopped just a moment, and turned back to them. A hand ran through his hair, and he stared at the tabletop, looking almost sheepish. Like something might be weighing on him. 

“I have epilepsy,” he said, finally. 

Juliette stared at the ground. She could see the marks, where her fingernails dug into the skin. If he would just sign the fucking paper, already. 

Jeff sighed, staring at his shoes.

The silence was about to choke them all, so Avery finally made his throat unstick. 

“Really.”

Jeff nodded, but didn’t look at them.

“I haven’t had a problem since I was in college, but I take medication for it and everything.” He cleared his throat. “My dad had it, too. It runs in families. Just…something to keep in mind.”

He’d signed the contract. 

What contract did she sign that gave the world the right to tear her life apart? 

Which contract made her Juliette Barnes? 

Which version – trailer trash, superstar, cheater, mother, pariah, wife, shame, lover?

Maddie was still plinking away. The girl Juliette had known since she was twelve, a soaring superstar who could go anywhere she wanted, soar higher than anyone Juliette knew. Juliette Barnes may have crashed and burned too many times to count, but she’d never wanted to watch this girl do the same. She’d never wanted to take her down, only watch her fly. 

The price of fame was Juliette Barnes being public property. She’d tried not to let it happen to her kids, but like everyone said – honey, this is how it is. Get used to it. Nothing in her life was safe or sacred, including her boys. She was created by other people to be exactly what they wanted her to be, and that may or may not include someone who was looking out for her children the same way she’d needed someone to look out for her, once upon a time. 

She’d tried to do the same for Maddie, even as the girl grew into the young woman who sat, slightly drunk, at her husband’s piano. Tried to be there for a girl who needed someone when she felt like there was no one else, and Juliette knew too well what that aching felt like; the need and loneliness and fear, and the feeling that no one heard, or cared. Her own eyes used to be so full of it, and she’s looked for it in the eyes of her own boys every single day of their lives. 

Juliette doesn’t think she’s ever seen it, but then again, maybe she’s just lying to herself. Like the way her own mama used to lie to her, filling her with those empty promises. 

Maddie looks up from the keys, at Juliette staring off into space. Then she turns back to the keys, and starts playing the only piece Juliette knows, something she thinks is Beethoven but doesn’t want to ask. The girl looks like Deacon when she plays, and sometimes Finn looks at her with an expression in his eyes she wishes she didn’t have to see. Juliette looks at Maddie, and still sees the thirteen-year-old girl who sat by the hospital bed of her comatose mother, blaming herself for the destruction all around her. 

Seeing Jeff’s name on that contract years ago, Juliette still wondered if she’d proved herself right. That she didn’t deserve this. Just like Jeff had told her. 

She shoves herself off the couch, nearly trips over the rug and her own feet. When she starts thinking about this kind of crap, it’s time to get good and drunk. Or, she supposes, in her case, good and drunker.

 

 

III.

 

 

I’m pretty sure Coach is going to pop quiz us on this chapter tomorrow – he usually does that so he doesn’t actually have to teach, just sit there at the desk and Google fantasy scores – so I’m trying to not skip every other line on this chapter. Still, I’m halfway down the page when I realize I’ve highlighted almost every word. I’m in the middle of highlighting a sentence about micrometeorites, which are tiny particles of meteors that rain down to earth and cover us. We can’t see them, and they tend to mingle with dust and pollen and dandruff, so we don’t even realize that we’re getting showered in little bits of the unknown. 

Finn’s still in the bathroom, doing God knows what. He’s already pissed that Avery made him miss swim practice because of his ear. He’s as religious about swimming as I am about school, so I don’t really blame him for being in a bad mood, but I have my history paper to write, and I can’t do his homework on top of my own all the time.

Except I have before. And will probably do it again. 

Just not tonight. I think. 

He’d do the same for me, which is anything. 

It’s been this way our whole lives. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t “Finn and Maia”, or “Maia and Finn”. Against the world, because the world was against us. 

It’s not like we planned on that happening – it’s just what happens when the world thinks they know all your family’s dirty business, and feels like they’re allowed to say and do and judge whatever they want, because they think they have any idea what it’s like to be a member of your family.

By now, everybody knows about Finn’s mom’s big scandals, and anybody can watch my parents’ reality show streaming online at the touch of a button. They see these people and think they know them. 

They think they know us. 

By the time we hit third grade, everybody assumed my name was “Lesbo Lexington”, and people were quoting bits from that horrible show to me, some of the things my mom said that became big catch phrases when the show became really popular. And while people just made fun of my mom for looking like an idiot on TV, everybody remembered who my dad really was. Some enterprising seventh graders started calling me a rugmuncher when they passed me in the halls. I had some random person leave a note in my locker asking me if I did threesomes. Parents wouldn’t let their kids hang out with me. Boys told me they’d never kiss a bulldyke, and anyway, nobody would ever want me because I didn’t have tits. Girls called me “butch” when I wore pants; “lipstick lesbian” on the dress-up days when we were forced to wear dresses and skirts.

Meanwhile, Finn’s mom was showing up in the tabloids, and reporters were camping out on his lawn.

It wasn’t like either of us were ever popular, but we were always quietly uninvited to birthday parties and ostracized in the lunch room. 

Basically, we’ve always known that it’s just us. And by now, we’re way beyond needing anything from anybody else. 

Sometimes, though I remember the days before we knew that. Like the days when Finn and I were little, we used to play this game called “Steeplechase”. We’d run around in empty concert halls and stadiums and amphitheaters while his mom and dad – or Rayna and Deacon – did their soundcheck, and we’d grab the backs of the seats and jump over them. We’d always end up at separate ends of the venue, but by the end we’d always jump back together. No matter how long it took us, we’d always meet in the middle. 

Then there were the nights when my father would show up. 

It was always after I was asleep, so at first I was never sure if he was really there or if I just imagined he was back. And then I’d smell him – soap and leather, like detergent and toothpaste, like the road after it rains. I think I can remember the nights he’d show up and come straight to my bedroom, when he’d wake me up just to tuck me back in.

Back then he felt like the sky, buffering the clouds along in it. He’d lie down next to me and wrap me up in my arms and kiss my hair, and ask me to tell him what’s going on. And I’d tell him everything, and when I couldn’t figure out anything else to tell him I’d make stuff up, just so he’d stay there next to me and make me feel like I was as real as he was, smelling like the road and listening to him call me “the prettiest little lady in all of Nashville”. 

I’d talk until my throat was hoarse and I was so tired my eyes felt stuffed with sand. And he’d stay there, and I could bury my head into his shoulder, and he’d lie still and just hold onto me.

Before I fell asleep, he’d kiss my forehead and squeeze me tight, saying, “you are the only girl in the whole wide world for me.”

On those nights, Gunnar would look at my dad with that face he gets when he wants to say something but can’t. Usually it’s one that he saves just for my dad, and just for the nights he’d show up to see me. 

He hasn’t done that in a long time, but I can see my dad’s face in shadows, sometimes. Still feel his arms holding me, smell how solid he feels, and even though I didn’t know her I can see why my mother fell in love with him. When Will Lexington says that he loves you, it feels like standing right in the sun. He’s so real, and solid, and back then I’d believe anything he ever told me. 

Like how he would be there in the morning, or how he’d stay the night. How he’d be there if I needed him. How bad dreams weren’t real, and nothing could hurt me. How I was safe. 

I don’t know my mom, but maybe I’m just like her. Because I always wanted to trust him so badly. But I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing I’d want to compare notes on, if I’d known her. 

My dad never talks about my mom. I never do, either, with him. It never seemed weird that I didn’t bring her up, because it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of memories to talk about and he never even said her name. Besides, whenever he was around, I wanted all of his attention to be on me. 

And even now, we still don’t. Talk about her. I’m not sure how either of us would even know how. 

Deacon sold his old house years ago, so I haven’t seen the room where I lived with my mom the first year of my life since I was in elementary school. When I went to his house back then, I used to see the indents on the carpet where her bed used to be, and my crib. The walls were painted over, so you couldn’t see what it looked like in the pictures I saw: the pale yellow color they’d been when I was born, stenciled with red flowers. In the last years he owned the house it was used as a storage room for his guitar collection, and the door was kept closed all the time. Apart from some of Maddie’s things that were strewn all around the house, there was no evidence anyone but Deacon lived there. Definitely no trace that a baby had spent her first year of life inside these walls, learning to walk on the wooden floors.

I don’t know what would happen if I saw it now. What it would do. It’s like bringing up my mom with my dad. I wouldn’t know what to do with any of it. I’m not sure what I’d say or think, or how it would change anything. If it even would. 

I’m not sure I’d want to compare myself to her, anyway. What would I want to know about her? If she liked strawberry or grape jelly? What was her favorite song? Did she want a boy instead? 

Why’d she keep me, after everything my dad put her through?

I finish skimming another page of science notes, looking to flesh out the outline for my paper. An orange highlighter bisects the textbook that’s heavier than my head. Orange lines streak the glossy pages. Finn’s still not back yet, his math homework abandoned. I try to go back to studying black holes, quasars and white dwarves; matter and anti-matter. Dark energy, the unexplained energy that permeates all of space and causes the universe to expand at a greater rate. It’s unexplained, and it’s pulling the whole universe farther and farther apart. 

We haven’t talked a lot about Avery moving out, or Dad not inviting me to his thing with Nate. It’s like back in third grade when all the shit started hitting the fan, except now there’s all this silence. 

It never used to be quiet. Not with us, not like this. 

 

 

IV.

 

 

Avery is still working on the same three lines of what’s supposed to be the chorus when Gunnar cuts him off. 

“It’s not gonna get done if you try and force it,” he says. 

“Easy to say when you’re not on a deadline,” Avery replies. 

“Dude, you’ve been playing the same three lines for forty minutes now. I can tell when you’re forcing something that isn’t gonna happen.”

Avery scowls. “If it’s bothering you so much, I can always leave.”

But both of them know that’s not going to happen, so Gunnar tries to tune out the same chord rhythm and focuses instead on watching the ravioli simmering on the stovetop. 

From the living room, the Christmas tree lights go on automatically, and he catches their colorful glow out of the corner of his eyes. Gracie and Scarlett are both allergic to the real deal, so they had to buy one of those fake plastic ones from Walmart, but it really doesn’t look half-bad. A little bent in places, the branches a little gnarled, but it came pre-lit so he doesn’t have to fuss with the lights, and it only takes ten minutes to pop up and set out of the box every year, so he can’t really complain.

When the kids were younger, he and Scarlett used to go all-out for the holidays. Neither of them had ever had much growing up, so occasions were a really big deal to them, especially the major ones like birthdays and Christmas. They always bounced from house to house, spending Christmas Eves with Avery and Juliette and Christmas Days with Deacon and Rayna, and more often than not Maddie and Daphne would come by and see the kids. Scarlett would spend days cooking and Juliette would somehow manage to snag the best caterers in town for a Christmas feast. On Christmas Day they had a rule where the kids were not allowed to come downstairs before 8 AM, although he and Scarlett could always hear their excited whispers and little feet running to the edge of the stairs, hear their gasping and squealing and anticipation. 

He wonders what Christmas will be like this year. They won’t be sharing it with Avery and Juliette, that’s for sure. And Deacon and Rayna are thinking about taking off for the holidays, maybe going to his cabin for a quiet retreat, or someplace else nice and solitary. 

Back around Halloween, he’d asked Micah if he wanted to bring his family to Nashville for the holidays – Gunnar would pay for the trip – but he’d declined. His girlfriend’s entire family was flying down from Michigan to visit them in St. Louis, and they were going to spend New Year’s with some old friends of theirs, so traveling out of state wasn’t an option. 

He’d texted Will and asked if he was planning on seeing Maia on for the holidays, but never heard back. Which, all in total, doesn’t really surprise Gunnar. When Maia was younger she used to talk about how her dad would show up for Christmas, but then he wouldn’t and she’d be crushed and spend the whole day trying not to act like it. 

The worst was when he would promise her, and then still break her heart. 

He wasn’t sure how the subject of Christmas would be this year. Especially with Will and Nate’s whole ceremony thing. She’d act like it didn’t matter that her dad didn’t ask her to be there, even though they both knew it did. 

Maybe by now, Gunnar and Maia both should have gotten over the idea that they should expect anything from Will, given that he had never really been a part of her life. Gunnar didn’t doubt that Will loved Maia. But love didn’t always win the day. And he’d spent plenty of those rocking a fussy infant, or staying awake with the little girl because she had a fever, or moving aside in the bed so she could crawl between him and Scarlett, to know what real parenting was about. 

“Gunnar.”

He looks up, realizing he’d been spacing off and staring out the window. Music is playing from upstairs he doesn’t remember hearing before, and outside the sky is creeping with twilight. 

“Gunnar!”

He looks over at Avery, who had stopped strumming the same three notes on his guitar. He’s pointing toward the stovetop.

“Your water’s boiling,” Avery says, and Gunnar turned around to see the pot on the stovetop bubbling over, the burner hissing as he rushed to turn the water down.

“Shit,” he mumbles under his breath. “Sorry.”

“You okay?” Avery asks. “You kinda spaced out for a minute.”

“Yeah,” Gunnar says, trying to contain the rest of the water before it spills over. “Yeah, fine.”

“You want help?” Avery asks. 

“No.” He turns down the water and stirs the ravioli. “It’s fine. I got it.”

A phone rings, and Avery pulls his cell out of his pocket. Gunnar watches his face tighten and then freeze, and then Avery answers the phone with his eyes closed.

“Hey, Kell,” he says, and his voice is like hearing a pin drop. So quiet you can’t even hear yourself breathing; like you’re holding it to brace yourself before something big and unknown. “Yeah, I’ll be there soon. You got all your homework done?”

They’d sent Maia to Space Camp down in Huntsville when she was younger, at the Space & Rocket Center. She loved it. Everything Gunnar knew about science he could quote from Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he’d put up with Maia’s scornful face whenever he mentioned that to hear her talk about space. She talked about it the way Scarlett sang, or Will used to play in front of a crowd of twenty at an A.M. show or a sold-out one at the Bridgestone – like it was the purpose of the whole world, spinning their entire orbits, making them the most real versions of themselves.

Even if he knew nothing about all the science, it had inspired him to buy her a set of those glow-in-the-dark stars, the kind you pasted right above your bed. Jason had bought these for Gunnar when he was a kid, but neither of them knew anything about exoplanets and neutron stars or quasars, any of the things Maia ran on and on about while they glued the little plastic shapes to her bedroom ceiling, forming a galaxy that would glow above her head in the darkness. 

“A long time ago,” Gunnar mused to himself, as he pasted another star. He grinned at Maia. “In a galaxy far, far away…”

Maia had looked at him blankly. 

“It’s from a movie,” he supplied, scratching behind his head. Shit, was he really this old? Had he already become one of those dorky sitcom dads?

Maia rolled her eyes. 

“There’s so much going on in this galaxy. I don’t have time to think about what’s going on anywhere else.”

Gunnar tried not to smile. 

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

She turned to look at him, hands on her hips, and she looked so serious and ferocious that it made him stop and look at her, biting her lip in this way that made her look way too much like her mother. 

Will’s intensity, Layla’s eyes. It shook Gunnar, whenever he saw that. 

“It is,” she insisted, jabbing her chin at him. Then she looked up at the ceiling, gesturing at the hunks of little plastic, their jagged edges and the way that without moonlight, they just looked cheap and sad and easily forgotten. “Cause there’s all this stuff that’s so big out there, and they look so small but really they’re bigger than us, and we’re the small things.”

She blinked at him.

“We’re so small,” she said, her voice hushed, ragged. “And all these things go on, and we don’t know about it, and we probably never will, because it’s all too big. And then there’s all this other stuff that goes on that doesn’t matter but we have to think about it anyway and pretend like we care about them.” 

She looked up at the space above her bed, the paltry, glued-together galaxy. 

“All that stuff, it makes me feel like my head’s hurting,” she said, her voice still whispery. 

She stared at Gunnar, and it took him a second to realize she was expecting an answer.

“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice quiet, and that was all he could manage. What else could he say to that? 

He fixed some of the members of her little constellation that were coming loose from their glue, and Maia kept talking – about how when they looked through telescopes, what they were seeing was really a tiny, tiny, too-too-tiny little piece of the universe, barely a pinprick in a hole in a part of the sky where before we never thought there was anything at all. That in that tiny speck there were tens of thousands of other galaxies, tens of thousands so far away from us that what we see is this single glimpse of them, an image as they were at the very start of everything. 

At some point she’d started to cry, and Gunnar didn’t know why. So he just her into his arms and ran his hand over her hair, listening to her talk about how in Huntsville, the sky was so big and clear and the stars were so bright, and she could see the smear of the Milky Way in the midst of all the nothing and everything above her. 

Maia didn’t have those stars in her bedroom anymore; she’d left them behind when they moved, and she’d never replaced them in the new house. 

Gunnar wondered if she remembered them, or that day she’d tried to explain the sky and failed. He used to forget about them, and then he’d go to tuck her into bed and look up and suddenly, brilliantly, there they’d be, a shorted formation barely glowing in the dimness. 

It didn’t hit him them – it took a few years, mostly after Clay was born. He’d be up with the baby, relieving Scarlett from the late-late shift, and he’d be changing a diaper or warming a bottle or just walking the living room with a fussy infant, and out of nowhere he’d think about his brother, and what he would have to say about Gunnar now. Married, kids, house in the burbs; a career and albums and awards and prestige and everything he ever wanted, everything Jason should have and never would and it wasn’t fair and it still hurt. 

Jason gave up his chance to raise Gunnar. Gunnar gave up a lot of chances for Maia, but they’d never felt like a surrender, or a loss. And then more sacrifices for Gracie and Clay. But he still made it. He had Scarlett. He had his kids. Jason was dead and Layla was dead and Will’s chance at superstardom was gone, but he’d made it. 

He still wondered what his big brother would have to say to him about all of this. 

"You got it made, little bro", Gunnar liked to imagine. Or maybe he’d just say something like, "hey shithead, you owe me a fuckin’ life!"

At least there was Micah. It didn’t exactly comfort Gunnar to know that his first love had cheated on him with the brother he’d adored, but if there was ever a definition of a silver lining, it was his nephew. He saw Micah a few times a year, usually around major holidays, and while he and Kiley didn’t speak much anymore, he and Micah were still close. The boy could have gone a hundred different ways growing up, but he stayed out of trouble, stayed clean, and was the first member of either one of his family trees to actually go to college. Now he was living in St. Louis with his girlfriend and their son, who had just turned two a few weeks ago. Gunnar had flown out to St. Louis to visit them when the baby was born, and it blew him away to hold the infant and realize this should have been Jason’s grandson.

Was Jason’s grandson, either way. 

It was one hell of a sentence to turn over in his mind. His brother had been dead almost twenty years and would never know he had a son or grandchild, but both of them still lived on. What was in the past didn’t just stay in the past, no matter how buried it seemed.

Then again. Avery told the whole world that he had two sons, and always meant it. 

Just like Gunnar said, when anyone asked, that he had three children. 

A son, and two daughters. 

Just like he now had a place he called home, with roots to put down. Stability, warmth, comfort. Something solid, and his. A family, even without some of the most important people that had made that up; a slightly shorted constellation.


	3. The Beginning of Everything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT’S FINALLY HERE! And it only took…six months? *winces* Yeesh. I should really stick to oneshots.
> 
> (As of now, I don’t know if this will have an ending. Mostly because when I started writing this, it had no ending. Maybe I should be one of those incredibly pompous “literary” writers who ends every story with a preposition and BECAUSE ART.)
> 
> Thanks to everyone who read this story, who liked this story, who even gave this story a chance, and especially told me that they liked this story (which is still amazing to me). You are all perfect fucking awesome citizens of the universe. I wish you all a neverending supply of chocolate-covered espresso bites. 
> 
> Special thanks to whentherightonecomesalong & barkleyandbarnes on Tumblr, who read early drafts of this story and didn’t immediately block me on all social media. They’re exceptionally nice people. I kinda like ‘em. =)

I.

Avery finally abandons the song in favor of heating up the spaghetti sauce. 

“Can you grab a bowl for Clay? I need to put his aside. He won’t touch the noodles if they’re not plain.”

Avery hands him one of the plastic bowls they have for Clay, solid-colored that usually come with a matching spoon and fork. He won’t eat his food unless it’s is served in of one of those. It’s hard enough to get Clay to eat anything, actually – he’s turning into the world’s pickiest eater. Sometimes he’ll go through periods where he won’t eat anything except one specific food, like fruit. That’ll last for a few weeks, and then suddenly, he’ll be ravenous and constantly complain that he’s starving. The pediatrician says it’s just growth spurts, and Clay did shoot up like a weed this year – some of the pants Scarlett bought him at Christmas are already too short – but Gunnar prefers the “constantly starving” phase to the “I won’t eat anything but sliced peach” phase. Dinner is a lot less traumatic when Clay doesn’t fight them for every bite. 

Avery serves the pasta into a plastic bowl, and Gunnar feels his phone buzz in his pocket. A new text from Scarlett – SORRY WE’RE LATE, ALMOST HOME.

In his outgoing messages, he sees the text he sent Scarlett an hour ago, asking if they were done filming yet. Then he sees the texts to Will about this weekend underneath, still unanswered from this morning. For a moment, Gunnar forgot he ever sent it. He also realizes it never occurred to him that the incoming text could have been from Will. 

Straight-to-voicemail calls. Unanswered texts. Emails that are never answered, almost as if they were never sent in the first place. Gunnar’s gotten used to it, and wishes he hasn’t.

He glances over at Avery. “You sure you don’t want to stay for dinner?”

Avery shakes his head. “I’ll just get something with the boys.”

The first time Will ever saw his daughter was at Layla’s funeral. She was almost a year old at that point, sitting in Scarlett’s arms in a black dress that made her fussy and irritable – even then, she hated dresses. Will had shuffled into the church behind Gunnar, acting like he was trying to hide behind him, pretending to ignore the stares and whispers. But he slammed to a halt when he saw the blonde-haired, blue-eyed infant, the daughter he’d walked out on before she was born. His eyes were hollow, he looked like he hadn’t slept or showered in a few days, and people were still whispering – or, like Zoey, glaring at him– but his eyes were focused on the baby. 

At the same time Gunnar was burying his best friend’s ex-wife and trying to get custody of his baby, he was also losing visitation rights with Micah. Mrs. Brenner somehow found out that he was living with Will and dating Scarlett – Gunnar was pretty sure she was having a private investigator follow him around –and the day after the funeral, he was served another set of papers concerning his nephew. 

“He’s living with another man,” Mrs. Brenner told the judge. “One who has a sordid history of –”

She looked right at Gunnar. He stared back.

“This man is known for being in trouble with the law. Arrested for indecent exposure? For fighting? Reports of…sexual deviancy.” She could barely say the words. “And the girl he’s seeing – she’s got her own problems, had a breakdown onstage, stayed in a mental hospital. How many more unstable influences does he plan on bringing into Micah’s life?”

 _As opposed to a mother who drags her kid around to live with strange men she barely knows and then dumps her son like nothing?_ He could have shouted that out in the court room, but the goal was to get it together enough to be allowed to see his nephew. 

Meanwhile, Avery was busy planning Finn’s first birthday –two months before Maia’s – and Scarlett was trying to get Deacon to talk about his diagnosis, which was going about as well as could be expected. Then Rayna left Luke at the altar, and Luke was coming to him wanting song material, and as much as Gunnar didn’t want to disappoint him he was also this close away from losing the last connection to Jason he’d ever have. And all of this was going on while he tried to keep Maia out of foster care, and trying to get Will to talk about any of it – which he wouldn’t, of course. Gunnar spent his nights staring at the ceiling fan, unable to sleep as the shadows crept across his floor and onto the sheets of his unmade bed. 

Weddings. Disease. Birth. Death. They were definitely hitting the milestones in record time. Not for the first time, it made Gunnar wonder if there really was something in the water in this city.

Thinking about all of it – and not being able to STOP thinking about it – made him feel like crawling under the covers for the next ten years. Forget things like eating and being a responsible adult. He wanted someone to take care of HIM, for once. For someone to help him get through something horrible, instead of always being the one who had to deal with other people’s fallouts. 

Why couldn’t anybody just cut him a break? Who’d be there for him, if he decided to not get out of bed for ten days?

He resented Will for it, until he stormed into the guest room to give him a piece of his mind and saw that he hadn’t moved since the last time Gunnar checked on him. And all the fight whooshed out of him. It wasn’t a competition, which one of them was hurting the most. 

So he went downstairs, poured some cereal into two bowls, and took one to Will while he took the other back to his bedroom and watched some bad TV to kill the silence. There was a Nicolas Cage movie on TNT that seemed to do the trick, drowning out his thoughts about Micah and Jason and Will and Layla and Maia and the whole shitty mess of every little thing in the world well enough for him to finish almost half his cereal.

He lived on the stuff for a while. Good thing he liked Kashi Go-Lean. 

Scarlett checked on him a few days later, and was so concerned about the state of their cereal diet that she cooked for them, desperate for a distraction. Between all of Deacon’s doctor appointments, they also had to box up Layla’s belongings, trying to decide which things to toss out and which things to keep for Maia. She had also been trying to get a hold of the Grants, with no luck. They came to Nashville the day before the funeral to take their daughter’s body back to Connecticut, and didn’t speak to anyone as they came and went. They left behind everything Layla owned, and didn’t ask about Maia or try to see their granddaughter, whose existence they’d ignored since the day she was born. 

They ended up donating most of her clothes. Scarlett kept the most expensive   
outfits, setting them aside in Deacon’s attic for when Maia was older. As it turned out, Layla had a will in her name – she’d apparently had one drafted after the divorce was finalized, right before Maia was born – so all of the money she’d made at Edgehill, at Highway 65, and from the reality show would be put in a trust fund. She’d also left her daughter all of her jewelry and guitars. The only thing they had left to deal with were Layla’s journals, bound and kept in a giant storage bin in her closet. 

Gunnar had wanted to take them and store them in his attic, because he thought Maia should have those. It would be the only real way for Maia to know her mother, besides the stories they could tell her. Not to mention the things she would inevitably see and read about her mother, most of which weren’t true. 

When the car crash made headlines, Layla was identified as “star of the hit reality show _Love & Country_”, followed by a sentence or two of information about how Will had been her closeted co-star, and the show had been cancelled when he was outed. 

Hardly any articles mentioned that she was signed to Highway 65 and was working on her debut album, turning her career around. That she’d already released some of her own songs, and received good buzz from indie markets. Hardly anyone mentioned how she’d played at the Grand Ole Opry, was an opener on Rayna’s sold-out _American Ride_ tour with Deacon. Nobody talked about how she’d raised Maia as a single mother after Will divorced her and walked out on their daughter. That was how Layla was remembered in the eyes of the press – even in death, she was walking punchline.

“She might not have wanted her daughter to read some of the stuff she put in there.” Scarlett said, when Gunnar made this argument about Layla’s journals. “I wouldn’t want anybody reading mine. It’s private.”

“And Layla’s dead. It’s not like she’ll mind.”

Scarlet snatched the journal back. “I mind.”

“She won’t know her mom at all,” Gunnar told her. “She’s going to grow up with no real memory of her. Dresses aren’t going to give her that. Journals might.”

“So you would want Micah to have all of Jason’s incredibly private notebooks and letters,” Scarlett said. Her voice was shaking. “Because he never got to know his father.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s the same thing. You didn’t keep that box of memories from Kiley to give to Micah. You don’t talk to him about Jason going to prison or selling drugs or robbing stores because you don’t want him to have to think about his dad like that.”

“Yeah, well, Layla never robbed stores or went to jail!”

“No, but everybody in the world knows what Will put her through.” Scarlett’s face was bright red. “All Maia has to do is type her name into the internet, and the reality show pops up, and all those tabloid articles, and all these horrible things people said about her. And Maia will read that!”

“So keep the journals and show them to her. Let her know her mom was different.”

They did keep the journals, though Scarlett said they would have more conversations about them in the future, when Maia was old enough. Gunnar kept the engagement ring and the wedding band Layla still held onto, at the very bottom of her jewelry box. Scarlett thought maybe they should sell those, but Gunnar said that if Layla had held onto them after all this time, then maybe they meant something to her that even she couldn’t understand or describe. 

After he and Scarlett got custody of her, Gunnar would sometimes go check on the baby in the middle of the night and find Will sleeping on the floor of the nursery, or sitting in her rocking chair. Sometimes he’d just be staring at the baby in her crib, a looming shadow in the tiny glow of her night light, watching her like she was some foreign species and he wasn’t sure how close he ought to get to her. Sometimes she’d be staring back at him with wide eyes, sucking on her fingers and regarding him almost thoughtfully. Like she was waiting for him to make the first move.

Gunnar asked if he wanted to hold her, and he’d always shake his head, backing away like he was being offered a grenade. It took a few weeks of him camping out by her bed before he finally accepted the baby, and when Gunnar released her from his hold Will looked like he was having second thoughts, holding her away from him like a squirming, drooling football. He passed her back to Gunnar almost right away, but his arms had stayed awkwardly posed out, like he was still waiting for her soft, damp weight. 

That was more or less the way it went, for years. It was almost as if her real father never existed. Except he always did. He was the shape sprawled out on the bright green rug of the nursery, the slumped form in her rocking chair. A shadow in the middle of the night, heavy footsteps on their floor. Always trying to be quiet, like he was trying to make them believe it was just a dream, and he was never really there. 

Gunnar is never sure what’s worse – when Will bails without a reason, or makes promises he doesn’t keep. Although, he figures, broken promises mean that Maia actually got her hopes up. He’d say he’d be there for something – a birthday or a holiday or just a weekend to see her – and then come up with some half-assed excuse as to why he couldn’t. 

After one birthday Will had missed, something tapped on Gunnar’s shoulder in the middle of the night. When he opened his eyes, he saw a small shadow standing next to his bed in pajamas and tangled hair.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he whispered, trying not to wake Scarlett.

“I don’t feel good,” Maia said, her voice normal volume.

Scarlett shifted beside him, and when she saw Maia standing next to their bed, she switched on the lamp, making them all blink against the sudden brightness. 

“What’s a matter, honey?” Scarlett asked, her voice groggy. “You’re sick?”

Maia stared at the carpet, shrugging one shoulder.

Scarlett reached a hand out, touching the girl’s forehead. “Do you feel like you’re   
gonna throw up?”

Small headshake.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” 

Another small headshake. 

Scarlett peered over at him, then sighed. 

“Come here,” Scarlett said, and pushed back the covers, opening her arms. Maia crawled over their legs and nestled between them, her head buried in Gunnar’s collarbone, her hair sticking to his lips. He looked at Scarlett, who rubbed the little girl’s back with one hand, and took Gunnar’s hand and squeezed with the other. 

The next morning, they let her stay home from school. Gunnar was up before the sun, but Scarlett must have been up for hours, because she wasn’t in bed when he opened his eyes. He found her in the kitchen, staring into a mug of herbal tea, staring at the surface like it was going to say something for her that she didn’t want to say out loud.

“I don’t want him coming back,” she said, her face still in the tea, to his turned backside while he grabbed a clean coffee mug out of the cabinet. “I mean it.”

His hand froze on the cabinet. 

“We’ve had this conversation before,” he said. 

Scarlet didn’t answer, so he turned to look at her, hand reaching upward.

“What do I tell him?” he asked. “He’s banned from seeing his daughter?”

“Yes,” she said. Her back was still turned to him. “Until we trust him again.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” Gunnar slammed the cabinet door. “I trust him.”

“Well, I don’t.” She whirled around to him. “I mean it. If he does this again, I’m out. I can’t sit by and watch you let him slide anymore. It hurts her too much.”

She gripped her mug. “And we’re the ones that have to make this call.” 

“So, what,” he said. “You want to sue him? Spend a year in family court? He has rights, too! He’s her father!”

Scarlett balled her hands into fists at her side. He waited for her to say more, but she hurried out of the room, cup of cold, untouched tea still on the table. 

“If he’s going to be here,” she said, her voice low, “then I won’t be.”

The rest of that year – more time in family court. Lawyers and judges and social workers. The whole circus. Will shooting him these not-so-covert looks of betrayal, as the judge made Gunnar stand up in front of his best friend and recommend he be stripped of his parental rights.

They didn’t talk for months, after that. The whole time, he never saw Maia. 

There’s a clatter down the stairs as Finn appears, long limbs and hair longer than Gunnar’s used to seeing it on the boy. Ever since he started swimming competitively, his hair’s been so short, and it’s strange seeing it lanky and unkempt. He can tell Finn’s not used to it, either – he keeps touching the back of his hair with his hand, like he has no idea what to do with the slightly greasy shag. He even walks slightly off-balance, like without the water, he doesn’t know how to use his legs. 

“How’s the studying going?” Gunnar asks.

Finn shrugs. “Maia’s gonna get an A. I don’t know why she bothers studying.”

“What about your biology test?” Avery asks. “You studying for that?”

Finn doesn’t answer his father. He just pokes his head in the fridge, like finding a bottle of water is taking every ounce of his energy and concentration.

“Finn.” Avery’s tone is sharp. 

He looks at his dad. 

“We’re doing that now.” His tone sounds too hard to be casual. 

They stare at each other. Finn twists the top on his water bottle.

“Okay,” Avery says. “Well, we got to pick up your brother in thirty minutes, so finish up what you can.”

“Kay.”

“Do your ears hurt?”

Finn shrugs one shoulder. 

“We gotta put those drops in before bed. Remember.”

“Yeah, I didn’t forget.”

“Just reminding you.”

“I said I didn’t forget.”

Avery narrows his eyes, but before he can say anything they hear the rumble of the garage door, and Scarlett sweeps in with Clay.

“Hey, buddy!” Avery calls. “How was TV?”

Clay frowns.

“Boring,” he says.

Avery’s eyes widen. “Boring? What was boring about it?”

“It was boring,” Clay repeats, except he pronounces boring like “bowwwwing”. Then he turns to Scarlett and says, “Mama, I’m hungry.”

“Sorry we’re late,” Scarlett says, as Clay darts off to the bathroom. “Clay wanted to see the chickens.”

Daphne and her husband keep a pen of chickens in their backyard, and Clay is obsessed with the birds. Gunnar thinks they’re disgusting and mean, not to mention they probably carry all sorts of diseases, but Clay loves the little feathered monsters, and Daphne swears he’s some sort of chicken whisperer. He can always predict which one is going to lay an egg next, he can hold all of them without getting pecked, and they follow him across the yard like the Pied Piper. 

Gunnar supposes there are worse things in life than having the gift of communicating with farm animals, but still, he says, “Buddy, if you touched Ms. Daphne’s chickens, you need to go wash up right now. No food until you do.”

Clay darts off to the bathroom, and Scarlett unspools her hair from its bun, letting it tangle down her back. She squeezes Avery and Finn, then leans in for a kiss from Gunnar.

“How’d filming go?” he asks.

“Yeah, was it bowwwwing?” Avery asks with a smile. 

Scarlett sighs. “It’s over. That’s what’s important.”

Avery winces. “That bad?”

She waves one hand in the air, like waving away a pesky fly. “Ehh. They kept fixing my hair and adding more lipstick. And asking me to say the same things over and over again for the camera. We spent maybe twenty minutes actually playing the music.”

“Maddie said she didn’t like it, either,” Finn says. “She doesn’t think she’ll like the episode.”

“Well, maybe it’ll turn out nice in the end,” Avery says. “You never know.”

“Yeah,” Gunnar says drily, thinking of Layla and Will’s reality show. “Editing does wonders.”

“I want Cheetos!” Clay shouts from the bathroom – where the water is running, thankfully.

“Not before supper,” Scarlett calls back.

The water turns off and Clay comes in, a frown on his face. “I want Cheetos, Mama!”  
Scarlett narrows her eyes.

“Claybourne William.” Her voice is low. “Do not whine. No Cheetos.”

From his spot at the kitchen counter, Finn says, “you’re a big Cheeto, Clay.”

His son looks doubtful for a moment, considering this.

Finn says, “You’re a big Cheeto. Cheeto-Head!”

That does it. Clay’s face breaks into a huge grin, the argument forgotten.

“No, you’re a Cheeto-Head!” He giggles, pointing at Finn.

Finn makes a face at him. “You’re a Cheeto-Butt!”

“Cheeto-Butt?” Avery repeats.

“Okay, Mr. Cheeto,” Gunnar says. “Go get your sisters. Time for dinner.”

Clay stands in the kitchen, pointing at Finn and calling him a “Cheeto-Butt,” until Scarlett tells him again to tell Gracie and Maia that dinner’s ready, and he goes upstairs, still laughing to himself. If it wasn’t for Clay, Gunnar thought, nobody would laugh, ever. 

Cheeto-Butt. It’s hilarious.

 

 

II.

Did you know that stars might sing?

Starlight can be made into sound, and the stars themselves might be able to create sound waves. It has to do with the way plasma flows, high and low density regions, and how that plasma piles up in between those two different regions. It creates pressure pulses where the regions and plasma meet, but it’s so high-pitched that we wouldn’t be able to hear it. 

Actually, since space is a giant vacuum, nothing could be able to hear them, anyway. So even if the stars are singing to us, we couldn’t hear what they had to say. Even if we had the ability to hear them; even if we thought to listen. 

There’s this one song of my dad’s. It’s off one of his EPs, one he released off his record label in Atlanta. He wrote it himself, without a co-writer –a rarity for him, because he never thought of himself as a songwriter. 

It’s called “Lullaby”.

It sounds rough, for a lullaby, because it was recorded with just him and his guitar, sitting in his living room. No back-up vocals, no production, nothing but him and his guitar, this rugged strum and gravelly words that are hard to make out. 

Sometimes I hide in my closet and just listen to it on repeat. Eyes closed, in the darkness, just hearing his voice rumble through my ears and hum through my bones, matching the murmur of my heart. Like it used to when he was here and would lie down next to me and kiss my face and call me the only girl in the whole wide world. 

It reminds me of listening to that video of my mom singing “Angel From Montgomery”. It’s not about the words, so much as the feeling. 

He never sang the song to me. I don’t think he’s ever sung to me at all. If he did, I don’t remember. 

I don’t know if my mom ever did or not. Sing to me. I like to think so. 

Finn’s homework is spread out all over the place, but he isn’t doing any of it. I can see his notes when I look up from my homework. I have a lot of practice reading his handwriting so I can make out the awful chickenscratch, barely. Mitosis. Mitochondria. Daughter cells. He has a bio test on Friday. 

When I was little – before my dad stopped showing up – there were some nights when I could never fall asleep. It felt like there were these black beetles skittering across my brain – thoughts that wouldn’t leave me alone, things that kept circling my head no matter how hard I tried to shut my eyes. I’d feel hyper no matter how late it was. 

Those nights, Gunnar would say I couldn’t turn my brain off. He’d take my head in his hands and make a clicking noise with his tongue, like he was turning off a television, and then kiss my forehead. Scarlett would rub my back. I’d fall asleep between them and be able to turn off my brain. Be able to get rid of the bugs. 

When Dad came, it was a different story. I didn’t want to fall asleep; I wanted to stay awake as long as I could. I knew in the morning, he’d be gone, like some fairy tale character who magically winked away at the stroke of midnight. I would always try so hard to stay up all night, but it’s like trying to stay awake on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop when you’re five; no matter how hard you try and insist and demand your body not to, you always surrender to sleep. 

I’d always wake up feeling unbalanced, when he left. Like without his weight on the mattress, I wasn’t bolted to the earth like normal people. I’d wake up feeling that dizziness, as if I’d missed a step down the stairs, a swoosh of emptiness in my stomach; the tight feeling in my chest of knowing he was gone. 

It was one of those mornings I headed downstairs, head foggy and limbs feeling   
stiff and uncooperative, that I heard Gunnar and Scarlett arguing in the kitchen. 

“It’s not about him!” That was Gunnar. Around the corner I could see him pacing, his hands on his hips. “This is about her. It has always been about her!”

“Then why do you let him do this to her every single time?” Scarlett’s hands were balled into fists, like she didn’t know what to do with them otherwise.

Gunnar shook his head, tossing his arms in the air. 

“I dunno, Scarlett, because he’s her father? And with Layla gone, she needs at least one of her parents!”

“She doesn’t need this! Doesn’t need him just showing up whenever he feels like it! That’s not what being a parent is – ask Kiley!”

“Would you leave it alone?”

“No, I won’t.” Her voice dropped an octave; never a good sign. 

Gunnar couldn’t say anything to that, so he just shook his head.

“Fine,” he said, his voice quiet. “Then will you let me take her to a therapist now?

A hand on my shoulder made me jump. I whirled around, only half-expecting it to be my dad, and more than half-disappointed when it was only Deacon.

“Come on,” he said. “You don’t need to listen to that crap.”

While Gunnar and Scarlett continued to argue, Deacon steered me out of the kitchen and took me out to breakfast. We ordered a huge stack of pancakes with bacon on the side, and Deacon didn’t try to make me talk about it like Gunnar would have. He just ate his pancakes, nodding his head as he took another bite. 

“I think they’re extra fluffy this time,” he said, chewing thoughtfully. He arched his eyebrows. “What do you think? You’re my control group, here.”

I tapped my fork against my plate. I hadn’t taken a bite yet.

“Gunnar wants to send me to a doctor.” Syrup pooled in the center of my plate. I moved the prongs of my fork around in it, watching it drip from the ends slowly, taking its time. “He thinks I need one.”

“Do you?” he asked.

He didn’t ask it to pry. He just waited patiently for my answer. 

I shrugged, poking at my soggy pancakes. “I don’t know.”

Daughter cells split during mitosis from a single parent cell. Mitochondrial DNA comes from our mothers. I am 50% Will Lexington and 50% Layla Grant. She is my mother and I am her daughter. 100% of the mitochondrial DNA I have inside me comes from her, but I don’t understand how I can be 100% of anything without having any clue what that means, or half of something without knowing how it makes me whole. 

I know I get my eyes from her, but only because Gunnar and Scarlett and Deacon and Rayna have told me. I know I have her smile, because I’ve stared at the mirror and stared at her pictures and stared and stared and stared at our faces. They’re shaped nothing alike –mine is rounder, like Dad’s, with the same cheekbones and nose and forehead – but when her mouth tugs into a smile, I see my own mouth tug the same way. 

Everything else is his. Dad’s. Daddy’s. Me, his “only girl in the whole wide world”. 

When you almost all of your life living with people who aren’t related to you, it’s weird to suddenly look at someone and see parts of yourself in them. Their eyes, their smile, or the shape of their fingers. It makes you wonder what else you don’t know about yourself. What other parts of yourself you might not even realize you’re missing.

You can draw a direct line from Gracie to Gunnar. Not so much Clay and Gunnar, just Gracie. They have the same dark eyes and the same hair and the same smile, but it’s more than just the way they look, it’s the way they act. Like how Gracie gets frustrated when people don’t take things as seriously as she does, and gets so annoyed when everything doesn’t go the way she plans. Or she was always tries to make people feel better when they’re upset, and how she’s always making sure that Clay’s hot dogs are sliced extra-thin and makes sure he gets a goodnight kiss from his big sister before bed and that he shares his toys with friends when they come over.

Sometimes, I see Gunnar skimming the top of Gracie’s head with his palm, tucking hair behind her ears and calling her “the big girl”. And I have to look away because I feel hot all over and it makes me sick and angry. I hate that I feel this way, I really do, especially if I get all teary, but I get more mad at myself for feeling that way than at them, and I can’t make myself stop feeling it. 

Not that Gunnar’s ever made me feel like I’m “less loved”, because I’m not his kid. He doesn’t. The opposite, actually – he’s so completely paranoid that everything between me, Clay, and Gracie is equal that I think he drives himself a little crazy with it. When Gracie and I were little, we had to take turns being the first one to get tucked into bed and kissed goodnight, because he didn’t want to make me feel like I always had to be second to his actual daughter. I’m not lying, there was actually a chart he had on the back of the bathroom door, marking off in pen the nights that Gunnar went to Gracie’s room first, and then the nights he’d come to mine. We voted on everything, from what restaurant we’d go to, to what music we’d listen to in the car, to who got to be the first person to turn on the Christmas tree lights at the start of the holiday season and who would put the angel on the top of the tree. We were a very democratic family. 

So it’s not like I’m Harry Potter, sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs, or that Gunnar’s some wicked Disney stepmom who makes me sweep the floors. He loves me. He’s told me over and over again that no matter what I decide to do with my life, if it’s music or science or moving to Peru, no matter what I want to be or who I want to love, he and Scarlett and Deacon will always be here to support me. Every phone conversation, every school drop-off, every goodnight kiss, always ends with “love you”.

But I see Gunnar touch Gracie’s hair and my throat closes up. And I remember my dad tucking me into his arms when he’d put me to sleep, making room for me under his chin so I can put my head on his chest, when I could close my eyes and feel completely safe. I remember riding on his shoulders. He called me “the only girl in the whole wide world”.

I used to imagine, sometimes, that we were a family. Me, my mom, my dad. I used to think about us being together, or even singing together like Deacon and Maddie and Rayna. But all I came up with was a blank, just like the picture I try to conjure up an image of my mom on my own.

People are always really weird about the fact that I don’t have a mother. Kids at school were told about me in whispers by their parents, behind hushed doors and in the confines of their homes. The ones who didn’t pick on me for my dad would avoid being my friend, like sad backstory was contagious. Church bake sake coordinators and soccer moms, the same ones who called radio stations to have my father’s songs banned from radio years ago because he was “destroying the family values of country music”, would act like I was some disaster victim because my mom was dead. They’d cluck their tongues at me and make this “oh, you poor thing” face and pat me on the head like a dog. 

I was motherless. I was a story. I was tragic. 

Having a dead mom was, in a lot of ways, weirder than being the girl with the gay dad. Mostly because I didn’t know anybody who had a gay dad. I never saw any stories about kids who dealt with that. But kids with dead moms were everywhere – in fairy tales, in movies, on television – and in those, they were always something to be pitied. 

Sometimes, those head-patting soccer moms would tell me that my mother was in heaven. Sometimes they’d tell me she was proud of what a beautiful little lady I was growing up to be.

Finn and I were the only kids we knew growing up who didn’t go to church, which was just one more thing that made us different from everyone else. And because we weren’t brought up with any sense of religion, the two of us were totally baffled by the concept of Sunday school. Other kids in our classes spent Sundays making glitter whales to tell the story of a guy who was literally eaten alive by a giant fish. On Easter they decorated crosses made out of construction paper, because that’s what you do to celebrate some guy getting tacked up by his hands and feet on a giant piece of wood and hanging there until he suffocates. During Christmas, they made pipe cleaner angels and sang ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ and gave out stickers saying KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS. 

It all seemed too weird to us, hearing stories about blind people being cured and animals talking and people coming back from the dead. What was weirder was how everyone just acted like it was true without giving us a reason why. By that point, we figured that just gave us more reasons to avoid the arts and crafts crowd and stick to what we knew. Which was that people believed in some really weird shit. 

When I was younger, I used to feel like a monster because I didn’t really miss her. Actually, I made the mistake of telling people that I didn’t, and they’d stare at me like I admitted to murdering my mother. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t know her, really – I wasn’t even a year old when she died – so for me, there was nothing to miss. She was just a person in stories that people told, in photographs and magazine clippings that Scarlett kept in an album underneath the china cabinet, in grainy images online and YouTube videos of concert footage and old music videos, and that awful show I refuse to watch. None of those people are really Layla Grant – at least, the Layla Grant that was my mom. She’s just some character on a screen. 

I’ve been to her grave. After she died, her parents – the grandparents I’ve never met – took her body back to Connecticut, a state I’ve never been and probably won’t ever visit. Deacon paid for a funeral here in town, and Rayna paid for a memorial site. It’s a simple black stone surrounded by tulips, and in big silver letters it reads, LAYLA GRANT 1993-2015. Underneath her name and dates, there’s one more word written: BELOVED.

That last word always throws me. Beloved. When you break it down, it’s two separate words – Be Loved. More like a command than an honor, or a wish rather than a fact as sure as the stone it’s carved into. I used to run my fingers over that word over and over again, my fingers filling the indents in the black marble. 

I asked Gunnar once if my mom was in Heaven, and he stammered some response about how my mom was always a part of me and she’d be here for me in the people who knew her, or something like that. Scarlett told me that when we die, we’re at peace with everyone we’ve ever loved and lost. Deacon told me that if I wanted to believe I’d see my mother someday, then I would, and nobody could tell me otherwise. He didn’t put much stock in the glitter Jonahs, either.

I never felt like my mom was near that stone. I’ve never talked to it, or prayed by it, or felt any kind of…presence, or whatever the cheesy movies say you’re supposed to feel. I don’t feel anything, looking at her name carved there. Maybe I would if her actual body was buried there, instead of hundreds of miles away in freezing New England ground. But really, I don’t know. 

It used to bother me, that I didn’t ever cry or feel sad. Now it doesn’t get to me so much. The gravestone isn’t really there for me. They’re for the people who knew my mom, and wanted to honor her, and wanted a place they could do that. I was just a baby, and it sucks that I’ll never know Layla Grant as a real person and not some abstract idea of a mother. But I stopped taking up Gunnar and Deacon on offers to visit her grave when I was about nine. I didn’t see the point in going where I wouldn’t feel anything, unless it was putting my fingers through that command etched into the slab, and letting myself trace that name and one word over and over again: _beloved._

“My ears hurt,” Finn announces. He’s supposed to be studying for that bio test, but so far all he’s done is go downstairs for a water break and stare out the window with his headphones on. I can hear music roaring in them. No wonder his ears hurt so much.

I wonder what percentage of our lives have been spent with music blasting in our ears. It’s a wonder we’re both not deaf.

“Still?”

He shrugs. “They always hurt, now.”

“Maybe if you stop pulling on them.”

“It hurts more if I stop.”

“Can’t you take something for it?”

“Nothing helps. It still hurts.” He leans against the headboard. “It sucks.”

It’s still too quiet. I’m not used to it. I don’t want us to be used to it. I don’t remember a time when we didn’t need more from each other than frosted doughnuts and bad television. Copying homework and cherry limeaids from Sonic. Weathering the things people said about our families because nobody else knew what it was like to be us. Everything between us was as normal as gravity –and in theory, given the laws of gravity, you could predict the future behavior of the way we’d orbit each other forever. 

“Do you want me to quiz you?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did you study at all?”

He picks at his shoelaces. “Why do you care?”

“Can you quiz me?”

He snorts. “Yeah.”

I pass him my notes. The laws of Newtonian gravity say that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It sounds like a mouthful, but when I helped Finn study for this kind of stuff, I told him it’s really just a math problem to understanding the way everything attracts itself to each other. 

“It’s still math,” he argued, then followed it up with, “whatever. It doesn’t matter at all.”

He can “whatever” as much as he wants, but it does matter. It’s the reason we have orbits. What it really means is, even the reason planets and stars and meteors that circle each other in this larger-than-life ballet can be boiled down to a math problem. Which means there’s an answer to circle at the bottom of the page; an answer to find. Even attraction can be an absolute.

Except. 

Add a third force of gravity and everything goes ballistic, throwing the whole system off course. And when you throw that third force into the equation, orbits become unstable. There’s too much pulling, not enough facts.

So when you put things in that kind of perspective, how can you focus on anything else? Like selling albums and brushing your teeth and wondering how many anonymous dudes your dad slept with while he cheated on your mother?

How can we?

But we do. 

Like right this minute: the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, and it’s the closest galaxy to us. Some astronomers think that we’re on a collision course with them, headed straight for a wreck of stardust and cosmos and fire and moons, until the universe is little more than hunk of rubble; a shell burning on the edge of the highway. Like my mom’s car after it was hit by that speeding truck driver on Briley Parkway, on the warmest October morning of the year. 

If the Milky Way hits Andromeda, we’ll dissolve. In an instant, we’re nothing. Here one minute, gone the next, like our world never existed and nothing we did ever mattered.

Except, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll swing past each other, like ballerinas manage to tilt and turn and spin and dance but never hit. Maybe we’ll be spared being exploded into nothing by a tick in the cosmos. Maybe we’ll be spared. 

Maybe the truck driver will swerve just in time, instead of hitting that little white car. Maybe my mother will pull off to the side of the road, instead of slamming into the truck at freeway speed. Maybe she’ll scared and crying and shaken but alive, instead of being buried under a mass of twisted metal and gasoline that explodes like a dying star. Maybe she’ll realize she survived, instead of being killed on impact. Maybe she’ll come home to me. 

Maybe we’ll crash, maybe we won’t.

People used to tell me that my mom was “with Jesus”, and that I’d see her again. But learning the sky made me think about the way the universe is. Nothing ever stops and nothing ever starts, both at the same time, because it all keeps spinning and things just keep going and re-creating and re-destroying together, and how we’re all matter, and matter can’t be destroyed, just transferred into other things, so it’s a part of everything. It’s never nothing. 

“Mawa!”

There are footsteps on the stairs, and Clay’s face appears in the doorway. He hasn’t really mastered pronunciation yet, so all of our names get messed up. Avery becomes “Aubie”, Daphne becomes “Dappy”, and Gracie becomes “Gwassy”, which never gets less funny. He could do worse with my name – for a while he was calling me “Mayo” – so for now, Mawa will have to do. 

Clay is giggling when he’s in the door, pointing at us. I swear, no one laughs more than this kid. Then again, if I was his age, I’d probably laugh a lot, too. Being four seems like a pretty nice gig, when you have it. 

“Is it dinnertime, Cheeto-Butt?” Finn asks.

I look at him as Clay explodes into giggles, still pointing at us. He’s muttering the words “Cheeto-Butt” under his breath. Whose idea was it to send him as the messenger, anyway? 

Finn glances at me. “I guess that means dinner’s ready.”

“Cheeto-Butt?” I ask. 

He smiles, for what I think is the first time all night. Then he heads downstairs, saying, “let’s go, Cheeto-Butt!”, and Clay starts laughing so hard I think he might fall over. 

I come up behind him, grabbing his middle and tickling him. “What’s so funny?” I tease.

He scowls at me, pushing me away with damp hands. I don’t really want to think about why they’re damp. When you live with a four-year-old, a lot of things will gross you out if you think about them too hard.

“Not funny, Mawa,” he says, his mouth pulled down. 

I make my eyes wide. “Not funny? Why is it not funny?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Is not funny!”

“Ohhhkay.” I let go of him. He’s still frowning at me, so I make a face at him. 

“Hey!” he says, and almost laughs.

“Hay is for horses,” I tell him. “But cows like it better.” Gunnar used to say that to me when I was a kid. It always made me giggle. 

Clay doesn’t look nearly as amused, but he does smile a little.

“Hay is for howses,” he repeats. 

“Yep, that’s right.” You can only get a few sentences out of Clay before he just echoes what you say and laughs himself silly about it. “Let’s go get dinner, bud.”

If we go by Newton’s law, we all should have crashed into the sun by now. Or spun into some black vortex that kills us all in two seconds. 

It hasn’t, though. We’re all still here. The orbits still dance. We’re still in the middle of a stellar warzone where comets collide and asteroids hurtle towards us like wayward bullets and stars explode, but I’m stuck in this stupid school full of idiots who watch reality TV and quote my mom’s show back to me and write “dyke” on my binders. My dad’s still in Atlanta with the man who is going to be his husband in forty-eight hours and won’t return my calls. I’m going to have a stepfather and I can’t be there to see it happen. And Finn still refuses to study. 

But he does stop pulling on his ears.

I know it was all fake. I know that my dad never really wanted to be with my mom. That he never really loved her. And it wasn’t like they had me because he wanted a family with her– he married Mom to hide, and then she got pregnant. I wasn’t supposed to happen. I was just…part of the story he was telling. I was necessary. 

Who knows – if that reporter hadn’t outed my dad when he did, maybe he would have changed his reputation from “Will Lexington, superstar womanizer cowboy” to “Will Lexington, superstar reformed bad boy and devoted family man”. A baby bump would give him a new cover. I would have made a nice prop for the photo-ops and magazine covers. 

Sometimes, I think that’s the reason Dad doesn’t try harder to see me. Why I’ve never lived with him and Nate. Why he doesn’t want me in Atlanta with him this weekend. 

Because it’s hard enough just hearing about the things my dad did, once upon a time. Imagine having to live with them.

Everyone else only sees the Will Lexington from the tabloids. And _Hollywood Tonight_ and _Inside Edition_ and that horrible, horrible show. But I know the Will Lexington who kissed my face and said I’m the prettiest little lady in all of Nashville. Who was bigger than the whole sky and would hold me tighter than I could breathe. And touch my hair and pick me up so I could feel tall enough to scrape the sky with my fingernails. And he never calls when he says he will and doesn’t visit and makes promises he never keeps and said he’d stay and didn’t and left my mom and me and I hate him sometimes, I hate that it’s always so easy for him to leave, he did it before I was born and he’s still doing it now and why is it always so easy for him to leave, why do I let him leave, why do I wait for him, why do I expect it and still get surprised when it happens – 

He must be so ashamed, whenever he looks at me. Who wants to look at a constant reminder of the worst days of your life?

No wonder he didn’t invite me to the ceremony. He’s getting married to the man he loves. It’s supposed to be the happiest day of his life. Why would he want the kid from his totally fake marriage just showing up and reminding him of how much he used to hate himself?

I follow Clay and Finn down the stairs. His notes are still spread all over my covers. Daughter cells split in two during mitosis. You get 50% of your DNA from each parent. You can have a half-brother or half-sister, but parents can never have a half-child, even if they only make up half their child. It’s all or nothing with them. I was the kid from the woman he gay-married for, like, five seconds. And if he’d been more careful, I wouldn’t even be here. This wouldn’t be his life. 

Finn doesn’t get why I like science so much. And as much as Gunnar and Scarlett support and encourage me and everything, they don’t get it, either. Not completely. But my whole life story is a series of feeling small and dealing with unanswered questions and realizing the more answers I find, the less I understand. It’s why I tend to like absolutes. It’s nice to have something concrete to rely on; an answer to circle at the bottom of the page, instead of just a question mark. Or a conclusion you wish you hadn’t reached.

Space may not deal in absolutes, but at least it lets me know there are bigger things out there. Bigger than country music and reality shows and dads who don’t invite you to their weddings because they’re ashamed you exist and you miss them even though you don’t want to but you can’t stop missing them and you hate that you miss them so much because it hurts, to miss him so much. I can’t miss him this much. 

So maybe space is the perfect place for me. Filled with patterns to find, and secrets to pick out of the dark fabric of all the exploding blackness, things we know to be real and everything we have yet to discover, as we look farther out and closer to the beginning of everything.

There’s matter everywhere. Everything can be anything. I am living in this world. 

I don’t think he’s ever going to call.

 

 

III.

The house alarm goes off when she and Maddie finally make it back to the house. Emily came to pick them up at the cottage – they were too drunk to drive – and apparently Avery had been here earlier, because he’d set the house alarm system that Juliette never used, and when Emily put the key in her door alarm bells went off, rattling her already-hurting head.

She swears loudly as Emily frantically taps at the code box mounted on the wall. 

“Jesus, Emily, shut that thing off!”

“I’m trying! I don’t know the code!”

“Well, why should I know it?”

“I don’t know, because you live here!”

“Oh, right, expect me to do everything!”

Emily turns to say something else to her, but just as she does the house is suddenly quiet. 

“I just hit the disarm button,” Maddie says, slurring a little as she kicks off her heels. She has to lean against the wall so she doesn’t fall over. “Turned the whole thing off.”

Emily and Juliette exchange a brief glance before looking away.

Maddie runs a hand through her hair. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she says. 

“There’s some clean clothes in the laundry room,” Juliette says. “Grab something to sleep in.”

Maddie nods, waving her hand at them as she disappears into the upstairs hallway. 

“Who needs a house alarm, anyway?” Juliette mutters, clutching her head. It still hurts. “We live in a freaking gated community. We might as well live in a bunker.”

She tries to take her shoes off, but when she almost trips over the entryway rug, Emily reaches out a hand to her. Juliette swats her hand away, and Emily ignores it, holding her steady while she kicks her Manolo Blahniks into the wall. One of the heels catches against the white paint, leaving a long black scratch on the blank surface.

“Awesome,” Juliette snaps. 

Emily bends down to inspect the damage. Licking one finger, she rubs it along the stain, trying to get it to fade. “Nothing a little soap and water won’t fix.”

“Good. Maybe you can spit-shine my floors while you’re at it.”

Emily just sighs. “Do you need me to take the kids to school tomorrow? I can swing back after I drive Avery to the airport.”

She only stumbles a little on the word Avery, like mentioning him will set something off.

Juliette shakes her head. “No. I already asked Deacon to carpool.”

“You want me to stay, then?” Emily glances around the kitchen. “I can make something for the boys!”

Why, Juliette wants to ask. Cause their mama can’t cook for shit?

“No, it’s fine, Emily.” She tries not to sound bitter. Tries. “You can just go. You got an early day tomorrow.”

Emily still hovers a moment, so Juliette turns to her and says, “no, seriously, get lost. You don’t need to hang around here.”

Emily makes a face at her, and it’s a mark of how long she’s known Juliette – not working for her so much as dealing with and surviving her – that she doesn’t take this personally, just smirks at Juliette and gives her a quick hug that Juliette doesn’t resist or pull into.

“Goodnight,” she calls over her shoulder, and heads out the door.

Her head spins, and the morning will not be fun. She ought to have something on her stomach, besides that Chinese food they ordered in that she barely ate. Except there isn’t anything in the house, and Avery did all the shopping, and since he didn’t live here right now – 

She puts a hand on the fridge, more to steady herself than to open it and peek inside at the empty shelves. Maybe she should have taken up Emily’s offer to get food, because she couldn’t imagine what she and the boys were going to survive off of. 

She has a flashback to herself at six years old, eating dry packages of apple-and-cinnamon-flavored instant oatmeal for dinner. There was nothing else in the house to eat – Momma blew all their money to get fucked up. 

Then she slams her hand against the fridge. Which does absolutely nothing, except make her hand hurt.

“Fuck,” she swears, too loudly, but Maddie doesn’t hear her on the other end of the house. 

Her kids have never been hungry. They’ve never been left alone for days and nights with no one to hear them cry – out of fear or hunger or loneliness, or wondering if their mother will ever come back for them. They’ve never been groped by old creeps, pulled into laps and felt up under bedsheets when they thought they were safe and sleeping. Their bad dreams are all imaginary, not so real you wonder if you’re ever really sleeping, like your whole life is one big nightmare. 

It’s been years since any of that happened to Juliette Barnes.

It’s been years she had to look away from Finn, when he had an expression on his face. When he was little, sometimes she’d have to put him down and walk away and get her bearings. Even if it meant he’d cry. She just needed a minute. To remember why she couldn’t go through with getting rid of it – the last trace of the worst mistake of her life. Why she let it grow and breathe and live and remind, until it became a “him” she carried right underneath her heart. 

It’s been years since she’s had to think about it all. Because she had the baby and Avery’s his father and they both love each other and that’s the way it is. So she’d tell herself, and then march back into the nursery, pick up her crying, dark-haired, dark-eyed son, and try to sing to him something that would make her feel like she was somebody’s mama. The good kind, not the kind that left their kids to cry all alone and wonder if anyone could hear them. 

Glenn never judged her for it, and neither did Emily. Glenn loved pretending he was a grandpa; Emily was just used to being a babysitter. So of course, that left her to judge herself enough for all three of them. Four when you included Avery, which she always did, because really, how could a guy raise a child that wasn’t his for sixteen years and not judge you a little bit? 

She never did understand why they all didn’t leave her so much earlier. 

Glenn couldn’t just have just used her up and then bailed on her. That would have been easy to live with; she was used to it. No, she got the joy and fun of watching him slowly get sucked away from her, until there was nothing left. And then it was only two of them in the room together, and then just her, all alone. Again. 

Finn never cried over Glenn, not once. Keller did, for days, and Emily and Avery had to take turns consoling him because if Juliette had her way she would have stuffed his mouth shut so she didn’t have to hear it. But Finn didn’t cry. Not at the funeral, not the wake, not as they lowered the coffin into the ground. 

The night after the funeral, they came home from St. Louis on her jet, bedraggled and jetlagged and slightly tipsy – well, she was. She’d had almost an entire bottle of expensive champagne, and then nearly puked on landing. Keller had cried the whole way home, and Avery carried him upstairs. Juliette was happy to leave her husband to the chore of doing this; she’d rather sit here on the couch and watch TV and let the last forty-eight hours pass through her, like maybe they were a bad dream.

“Ma?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. No rest for the wicked. 

Finn stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, staring at her with an expression she couldn’t read in the darkness.

“Yeah, bud.”

When he didn’t answer, she thought maybe he’d left her alone. 

“Whatcha watchin?” he asked her. 

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Some real estate show.” 

As if this statement needed an apology, she tagged that last line with, “it’s always on.”

He didn’t sit on the couch next to her, just leans over the top of it. He always smelled like chlorine and those hot, damp pool rooms that completely disgusted her, but after being on the jet and in St. Louis and then back on the jet again all day, he didn’t smell like anything. 

Glenn loved watching Finn’s meets. Juliette hated being in those sweaty, cramped rooms that stank of feet and chlorine and body odor and were always so loud, but Glenn loved cheering Finn on. Even when he was too sick to be leaving the house, he’d sit on the bleachers, wrapped in a jacket even if the pool room was sweltering, and watch the meet with a smile on his face. 

“What’re you doin’ up, anyway?” she asked. Shook her head. Cleared the smell of indoor pool chemicals out of her nose and the memory of how thin Glenn had been on those days out of her head. “It’s late, don’t you have school tomorrow?”

Finn shook his head. “It’s a half day. Teacher workday.”

He had a bowl of cheese puffs in his hand, and he offered it to her. She wasn’t hungry and couldn’t remember the last time she had been, but she’d had a lot to drink on the jet, and now that the liquor buzz was wearing off, she realized she was starving and would definitely have a headache soon. 

“Wanna sit, Finny?” she asked, and then patted the seat next to her. “Come on, sit down. Stay awhile.”

Her son smirked at her, and it was tough to look at that expression, but he humored his mama and sat down beside her, maybe closer than he would have, because Finn was not a cuddler and never had been but he was sitting next to her on the couch, his lanky, gawky not-yet-teenager body closer to his mother than he normally allowed. He’d already grown so much taller than her and Avery. 

“Where is this place, anyway?” he asked. 

“Some place in Europe. Not sure.” She took another bite of cheese puffs. “Looks pretty, though.”

They sat there in silence for a while, munching on cheese puffs. 

“I always wanted to go to Prague,” Juliette said, pronouncing it “Pray-guh”, as on her TV the real estate agent was guiding a woman through a Tuscan villa Juliette thought looked more like a movie set than a home people would live in. The woman who was looking at the home was wearing Oscar de la Renta and looked like she’d just stepped out of a spread for Vogue, but even with the volume down low, Juliette could make out the nasally, perpetually-dissatisfied whine in her voice. 

Finn chewed more cheese puffs.

“I think they pronounce it ‘prog’, Ma.” Her son’s smile. Always, it was more like a smirk. Lately, it made his mouth twist in a way that made her own fill with metal. Those dark eyes and sneering expressions, arrogance and bravado and familiarity. 

She turned back to the TV. “Right. I was testing you. For that half day tomorrow.”

She could feel him rolling his eyes. 

“Ohhhhkay.” 

The expression in his voice made her smile. A little.

They sat like that for a while, Finn behind the couch and Juliette cross-legged on it, sharing the bowl of cheese puffs. On television, the stupid rich lady who was house-hunting wouldn’t stop complaining about how the countertops weren’t like she wanted, and the bathroom was too small, and the lights weren’t nice enough. 

A flash of the trailer parks and ratty motels she spent her childhood in flashed before her eyes, and Juliette remembered why she hated reality TV.

(Unless it was a certain reality show starring a certain little twit. Juliette was aware it was considered tacky and ill-advised to mock the dead, but sometimes, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Seriously…robot tones?)

The woman onscreen was still complaining. Juliette wished she would just shut the fuck up, already. Some people had real problems, she wished she could tell her. Like crackhead moms and no adults to count on and kids you wondered if you were capable of loving, whenever they smiled a certain way. And dad figures who wasted away right in front of you until they were sacks of bones with skinbags pulled over their skeletons, and they died holding your hand. 

“Momma?”

She looked over at him. “Yeah, bud?”

“You know…” he stared back at the TV. “You know how Maia’s mom died and everything.”

Right. Because they had just buried Glenn. Why not talk about Layla freaking Grant on what was already one of the worst days of Juliette’s life. 

God, someone please explain to her how her son has spent his entire life being best friends with Layla Spawn. 

Juliette nodded. “Yeah, bud, I know.”

Finn was quiet for so long, she wondered if that was the end of the line of questioning on that little blast-from-the-please-go-away-past. 

“Do you think Maia misses her mom?”

They were pregnant at the same time, Layla and Juliette. For a while, Juliette was afraid that they’d deliver on the same day, and everything would completely be ruined. Of course she would completely steal Juliette’s thunder (never mind that Layla was almost two months behind Juliette in terms of how far along she was). That changed when Juliette needed an emergency c-section and delivered Finn three weeks early. _People Magazine_ put them on the cover. They were on the front page news of every entertainment blog. 

Then Layla almost gave birth to her kid at the freaking Bluebird. Of course. Then everyone was buzzing about it: the girl who was raising the gay cowboy’s kid, after he dumped his pregnant fake wife. The whole story was right out of some trashy daytime soap opera. 

Even if Juliette couldn’t help but enjoy the way people called Layla the “reality TV star” and made frequent use of some of her stupidest moments from the show. Even as an internet laughingstock, Layla Grant still had more Google hits than Juliette Barnes. 

It was never inevitable, that Finn and the kid would be all but joined at the hips. Juliette knows. She tried so freaking hard to prevent it. 

“You think you could try to have a little compassion?” Avery snapped, once, when Juliette made some backhand remark about the kid. Juliette doesn’t even remember what it was, now. Did it matter, anyway? 

“Why should I? She isn’t my kid.”

“She doesn’t have a _mother_ , Juliette. I think you of all people would understand how that feels.”

Juliette rolled her eyes. “Please. She’s not Little Orphan Annie. She doesn’t remember anything. She was a baby. And it’s not like she’s growing up in some crack-infested trailer park – oh, boo hoo, her life is so rough, taking her hits in a huge house in Brentwood with people who love her and give her everything. It’s so hard.”

Avery just shook his head. 

“Wow. I knew you were selfish. But being jealous of a baby whose mom just died? Takes it to a whole new level.” He mock-clapped. “Way to go, Juliette.”

“I am not jealous!” Her jaw dropped. “She’s a baby! There’s nothing to be jealous of!”

“Well, there must be, because you’re making this all about you, as usual.”

“So, it’s selfish to not feel sorry for the kid, because she’s not gonna grow up with an addict for a mom? Or creep boyfriends who are gonna try to feel her up when she’s sleeping? Or go hungry because all their money goes up her mom’s nose?” 

At this point, her voice was shaking, though she couldn’t say why. She and Avery hadn’t fought like this in months, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d even mentioned her mother to anyone – not even her husband. 

“No. Look, Juliette.” Avery rubbed his eyes. “I get that you may not think Maia’s gonna have a tough life compared to you, but I think you know it sucks to not have a mom, no matter how old you are.”

“Why are you treating me like it’s so awful,” Juliette snapped back, “that I don’t really care about a kid that isn’t even mine?”

She realized what she’d said a second too late. 

That vein popped out in Avery’s forehead. The one that always came out when he was way beyond pissed. When he was ready to read her the riot act. 

Except he didn’t. He just walked away. 

Years later, the injustice of it all still rankled. Even if she’d learned to deal with her son growing up side-by-side with the spawn of that little twit (kind of). Even if she’d learned to deal with the kid practically living at her damn house. Even if she’d sort-of learned to keep her mouth shut and not make waves because somehow, she and Avery and Gunnar and Scarlett have all turned into some weird sitcom group of friends who lived out of each other’s houses. None of that changed the fact that one of the biggest fights she and her husband ever had was because of Layla Grant. 

“Momma?”

Juliette blinked herself back to the present. “Yeah, Finn.”

Finn stared at his knees. 

“Do you think she does?” he whispered. “Miss her?”

She stared at the screen. He stared at her. 

“I think,” Juliette said, the words turning over her tongue slowly, “that it’s hard to lose your mama. No matter how old you are. I think everybody needs their mothers, at some point.”

“And dads?”

She whipped her head around. “What?”

Finn stared at her. “Do you think you need your dads, too?”

She couldn’t imagine how he would know. The birth certificate listed Avery’s name; all of his legal documents had Avery listed as Finn’s father. And since he was the one who held Finn and changed his diapers and was in the room when she gave birth to him, he was, for all intents and purposes, her son’s father. Even if a blood test would read differently. 

There was no way he could know that. Avery would never tell him. Deacon and Rayna never would. Scarlett or Gunnar? She’d kill them if – 

“You know who you remind me of, Finn-man?” she asked. 

Her son stared at her in the blueish glow of the television. “Who?” 

“You remind me of my father,” she said, and touched his cheek. He didn’t stop her, even if he was looking at her like he thought he should. Her hands were grainy from the cheese puffs, and they left little streaks of yellow chalk dust on his face. 

She brushed it off with the pad of her thumb. His skin was still so smooth; he didn’t need to shave yet. 

“He was a pilot in the Army, did you know that? He’d always put me to bed and tell me the Army slogan. You know it?”

Finn didn’t move. He was holding as still as possible. “No.”

“This we’ll defend,” she said softly. “Every night before I went to bed. I always felt so safe with him. We lived on a base in Fort Rettin until I was three. Me, him, and your grandma.”

She cupped his chin in her hand. 

“He would have adored you,” she murmured. “So would your grandma. You remind me so much of him.” Her hand was still on in face. “Both so steady.”

His eyes were so wide. It was like he was a baby again, staring back at her, and she was holding him in the hospital room and birth certificate hadn’t been printed yet and she had no idea what to do with this squirming dark-haired alien in her arms that had grown inside her body and taken from her, taken and never given anything back and would now keep taking from her, and she’d be expected to let it, for the rest of her life and his. 

“Finn?”

He turned back to the television, so Juliette could barely see him. He was a shadow on the couch. 

“Yeah, Ma?”

“Don’t set the alarm at night. It’s okay.”

The shadow on the couch shrugged. “Dad asked me.”

“Tell Dad I told you not to.”

She bent in, and he was either too slow or too fast, because before either one of them could decide not to do it, she slipped her arms around his broad shoulders and squeezed him, tight. They sat there for a moment, backlit by the TV still yakking about property values, and she didn’t want to pull away but then she had to let go of him.

So she let go. 

There’s a pile of Keller’s hockey pads in the corner, and now that she thinks about it, he really needs to put them in one central place so they’re not strewn all over the damn houses. Stomping over to the sweaty pile, she grabs it all up in her arms and heads to the laundry room, throwing it all inside the washing machine.

Normally she doesn’t touch the stupid thing, so she isn’t entirely sure how to turn it on. Mostly because most of her clothes are dry-clean only, and what isn’t their housekeeper usually takes care of. 

Also, Avery teases her that she can barely plug in the toaster without setting the house on fire. 

She slams the lid shut on the washing machine and finds what she hopes is the on button, jabbing it with her thumb. She hears a whir from inside, feels the vibration under her hands, and then the sound of water pouring inside. She keeps her hand on the lid of the machine, feeling it rattle under her hands, and stays there for a moment, smelling the detergent and dryer sheets and wiping her suddenly damp eyes with the backs of her hand, the rattle of the washer enough to drown out any other sound in the room. 

 

 

IV.

On the way home we pass a giant red and white house that used to have horses out front. When we were younger, Maia and I would sneak them apples from the kitchen, and when the owners caught us feeding them, would unwrap peppermint candies and teach us how to feed them, keeping our palms flat and our fingers tucked inside so the horses wouldn’t nip them. Maia even named them – Nebula, and the other one was Io. She said it was one of the names of Jupiter’s moons. 

I sometimes imagined riding away with Maia on them. They’d take us out of Tennessee, and to anyplace else. Like Montana, or Wyoming. Or the Grand Canyon. Was that in Arizona? Or Colorado? 

Fuck it, we’ll just go to South Dakota. Nobody fucking lives in South Dakota. 

It could be like when we were kids. When we had pool parties at my house. Scarlett and Aunt Emily would cook and my mom would say that she provided the house, so she shouldn’t have to cook. Dad would always yell at me and Maia to include Keller because he got all whiney if we left him out, which was all the time. Gunnar would let us jump off his shoulders into the water. Maddie would wear something too dressy and refuse to go in. Daphne would have cannonball contests with us. Paw Paw Glenn would sit in one of the long chairs by the shade, and just watch us with a smile on his face. He used to go in the water, but most of the time he’d just sit in that chair and watch, laughing when he splashed each other and got into water wars. Maia and I would jump off the edge of the pool into the water, fighting with the foam noodles and racing each other from one end to the other, while the parents talked and sang and sounded a million miles away to us. We didn’t need anybody but each other. 

He didn’t look like he was dying, at least not until the last few weeks he was sick. He looked a little paler than usual, but he’d always looked tired and worn down, but whenever he was around us he seemed happier. 

“Be careful, alright?” Dad would say, trying to hold us back. “Paw Paw doesn’t look like usual.”

But Paw Paw Glenn would wave him away.

“No, Avery, stop,” he said, and then reach for me and Keller. “Come on guys, get over here and tell me everything.”

Then it got worse, and Keller and I weren’t allowed in his room at the end, just Mom. We were allowed to say goodbye, and he kissed us on the cheek. It felt like sandpaper and smelled like sick. Nobody had ever done that to us, before or since.   
Keller shrank into Dad and didn’t want to stay. Aunt Emily had to take me by the shoulders and lead me out of the room. Mom was the only one left. She didn’t come home that night. 

Aunt Emily slept on the couch downstairs, and when I woke up she made us pancakes. I could tell she’d been crying a lot, because her face was all red and puffy, but she made herself smile when she looked at us and said, “come and get it, guys!”. Keller cried and said he hated pancakes. Dad looked too tired to snap at him for being rude to Aunt Emily. 

We had the funeral in St. Louis, where Dad told us Paw Paw Glenn was from. We didn’t know anybody there, and there weren’t that many people anyway. Keller complained he had a stomach ache, and then threw up in the jet on the way home. Mom yelled and Keller cried and Dad yelled at Mom and I sat in my seat and turned up my music and Keller was still wailing so I shut my eyes and pretended I didn’t smell puke the entire way home, while Dad changed Keller into different clothes and Mom fell asleep curled in the back of the plane after drinking almost an entire bottle of champagne. 

I kept my eyes shut all the way home. I felt like if I took my headphones out of my ears for a second, the silence in the jet cabin would suffocate me, like I’d been sucked out of one of the windows and hurtled through space. Maia said that if that happened, you’d die right away. That’s what it felt like what would happen to me. 

I think about those horses when Dad drives us all home. We pass the farm and I remember Maia naming them. We used to imagine riding away on them forever, going anywhere we wanted. 

If that happened, nobody could make us do anything we didn’t want to do. We’d never have to learn slope, or study for biology tests. Or stop swimming. Or listen to people call Maia names because of her dad. Or know that my dad isn’t really my dad. 

We drive home from Maia’s house in silence. Even after we picked up Keller from his friend’s house, the three of us were so quiet in the car. It’s the first time we’ve all been together since Dad moved out and you think we’d have something to say, but the longer we sit in the car, the quieter we are. I feel like we’re all holding our breaths. Like breathing too loudly could set off an explosion of all that thick, heavy quiet.

It never used to be like this. 

“Where’s Mom?” Keller asks, when we walk through the door. 

Dad puts his guitar case down. He’s studying the house alarm with a frown.

“Dad?” Keller asks. “Where’s Mom?”

“Shut up,” I tell him.

“Don’t tell him to shut up,” Dad says.

“You shut up,” Keller says to me at the same time.

Dad hits a button on the alarm. “Would both of you stop it? Mom messed up the house alarm.”

We stand there, not knowing what else to say. 

Then Dad says, “go brush your teeth. It’s almost bed time.” Like we’re seven.

Keller goes upstairs. I follow Dad into the main room, where he switches on the TV and starts watching an episode of _Dartpointe_ , a weird detective show we both likes and Mom always says is boring.

“Finn.” He says it like he was surprised I’m standing there.

“Yeah.”

It’s a second before he recovers.

“Did you take the trash out?”

“Yeah.”

“And the recycling?”

“You didn’t tell me I had to take that out.”

“Well, I’m asking you now.”

“Can’t Keller do it?”

Dad runs a hand over his face. “No, because I’m asking you to do it.”

We stare each other down. 

“You seen this one yet?” he asks.

“Which one?”

“The one where Rooney gets shot.”

“Nah.”

“You got homework?”

“Finished it.” I didn’t actually finish anything at Maia’s. But I’m not doing   
homework when Dad’s here.

“Wanna watch it?”

“Sure.”

I sit on the arm of the couch, not the cushions. He hates it when I do this. He doesn’t look at me, still focused on the TV, and we have the entire space of the sofa between us.

“Mom always gets confused watching this show,” I say.

Dad nods. “Yeah. But Mom’s never paying attention.”

It’s the first time we’ve been able to watch this together in a while, and since he’s going to be gone by morning I sit next to him to watch. Except it’s too hard to focus on the screen, and even though I like this show I can’t follow it. Everything pops off the screen like 3D without the glasses. It’s fuzzy and off and gives me a headache to watch.

I swear, it’s all because I can’t swim. Swimming is the only thing that ever kept my focus, anyway, and without being in the water I can’t concentrate. The smell of chlorine is better than taking Ritalin, which Mom and Dad got into another stupid fight over a while ago. Mom thought I should go on it. Dad didn’t. He said kids were so overmedicated and everybody was taking something or other. The thing was that they only argued about the Ritalin thing for five minutes before they started fighting about something completely different, and after a while they forgot what they started fighting about in the first place. 

If they’d just let me swim, it’d be fine. It would hurt my ears so much it’d probably kill me, but who cares. I’d be in the water again. I’d quit feeling like the ground was shaking underneath me, like the earth was tilting some other direction. I’d quit feeling like a fish flopping on land; like this flopping, gasping thing that can’t move and can’t do anything while it suffocates, big-eyed and stupid. 

But instead I sit. With Dad. 

He isn’t telling me to get off the armrest. 

After Paw Paw Glenn died, I asked Maia if she ever missed her mom. Which was, weirdly, the first time I ever asked about it. Even though I’ve known her my entire life, talking about her mom seemed like a topic we just couldn’t touch. 

“Will you think I’m a terrible person if I tell the truth?”

“I dunno.”

“I don’t.” Maia stared at the ground. “Miss her.”

We were quiet for a long time. This was the first time we’d ever talked about something like this. And maybe I did think differently of her? I didn’t know. I just didn’t look at her. 

Maia shifted beside me. 

“There’s nothing to miss,” she said quietly. “I mean, I was so little. I don’t remember at all. It’s not like I grew up with her. I’m sad that she’s dead and that she wasn’t in my life, but it’s not like I wake up every morning crying because I miss her.”

When I still didn’t say anything, she scooted closer to me, closing the gap. And for the first time ever, it felt weird that she was sitting so close to me. 

“I miss Mr. Glenn a lot more,” she whispered. “And I’d miss you if anything happened to you. But that’s because I know you. You’re not just a picture in an album to me.”

I didn’t know how to feel about that. When someone died, you were supposed to feel sad. When you lost a parent, it was supposed to be the worst thing in the world. 

Right?

I don’t know how she deals with all of this. Really. Her mom being dead. Her dad being totally MIA. If I had my father constantly making me promises and then letting me down, I’d be a lot less forgiving than she is. I know Maia loves the guy, and any time I say anything about him, she always takes it the wrong way. Like that time I pointed out that because he and his partner weren’t married, he wasn’t technically Maia’s stepfather. And she just blew up. She started crying and got so upset, saying who the hell was I to tell her what her family was, it was none of my business. It was the biggest fight we ever had. We actually didn’t talk for a few days. That’s never happened, before or since. 

I’d never repeat this to Maia, because given how touchy she is about her dad, she’d probably blow up and never speak to me again. But I think Gunnar and Scarlett are the best parents she could have. I mean, even if her mom and dad had stayed together, then what? Her dad would have been secretly gay and having all those affairs – the kind we read about on the internet, and believe me, I wish I could bleach my brain of that kind of stuff, because who wants to know that about your best friend’s father – and where would that have left her mom? Married to a guy who couldn’t love her? Someone who only married her to use her? And probably would have used Maia the same way? 

I can’t ever say that to her. I wouldn’t, anyway. It would kill her. She still keeps clinging to him and acting like he’s this awesome guy. She doesn’t want to see how he really is because it would hurt her too much. 

I don’t blame her. How can you wake up one day, look at yourself, and realize the person who made you and put you here doesn’t want you? 

I don’t know his name. I don’t have a real birth certificate that says who he is. I just know that he’s someone else. Somewhere, out there. He’s someone that could say he didn’t want a kid and walk away forever. He’s somebody and I don’t know him. He’s nobody. And he’s my father. 

I don’t think he loves her. Maia’s dad. Maybe he can’t. I don’t know. I’ve never met the guy. I just know that it’s so easy for him to walk away from her. It always has been. He can lie to her and make her all these promises he always breaks and not talk to her and not tell her why it’s so easy for him to fail her. He’s the one who fucks up, and she feels like shit. Every time. He’s been doing this to her for fifteen years and she hasn’t figured out that he’s the asshole and she can do better. She just keeps going back for more. 

I didn’t get it, when we were kids. How it could feel. Like you weren’t enough to make someone love you. Like you couldn’t even make them try. 

And since when should somebody try to love you, anyway? Why can’t they just love you and not fuck it up? What’s wrong with you, if you can’t be loved by the people who are supposed to love you, no matter what?

I think the saddest part is, I don’t know. I don’t know how that can happen, and I don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t know how to make it be okay. How is this something you’re supposed to be okay with, anyway?

It’s almost ten and Mom’s not here. I thought we were all supposed to be together tonight, but maybe not. Maybe that’s what they were arguing about, when they were pretending to fight about my aching ears. Maybe they were arguing about stuff like tonight, when we were all supposed to be here and pretend like we had a reason to be in the same house. 

I wait for Dad to say something. But almost an entire episode passes. Rooney gets shot. There’s a car chase. Dad doesn’t speak while I watch the whole thing from my armrest. I wait for him to say something but he doesn’t, I wait and I wait for the words, but they never come. 

I wish Maia would forget all about Atlanta. And I feel so fucking sad that she won’t. Not just for her, but for me. It makes me feel like crying.

And I have no idea why.


End file.
